Urasawa Naoki - 20th Century Boys, vol. 17-19

My mad rush through the series continues! For anyone curious about this series and why it has taken over my brain, you can ahem it at mangatraders dot com (free login required, but you can ahem by the volume, which is eight billion times better than individually grabbing 200+ chapters). Also, for the record, yes, I do mean to buy this once it comes out because it is awesome, but it seems like it won't be for a while yet.

I'd recommend this if any of the following interest you: the power of rock and roll, childhood memories and the mutability of memory, fast-paced thriller plots, interesting narrative structures that play with time, ordinary people deciding on heroism and doing the right thing despite personal cost, an excellent sense of time and place, the power of manga, the general power of art to change the world, people who actually look like real people and have noses and age, kickass heroines, and amazingly well-fleshed-out casts of characters.

I particularly want to highlight the women in the series (there aren't as many as I'd like, but the ones who are there are well characterized and they're all different ages and personalities); the very well-done setting (both time and place... I almost never get confused as to when I'm in a flashback or not, despite the lack of the signature "this is a flashback" black borders); the well-done cast of secondary characters, since I love almost all of them and Urasawa introduces new ones every volume or so; and most of all, how it's a series about ordinary people making the choice to become heroes or villains every moment.

That's probably the thing I love the most about the series; even though it's about the imminent destruction of the world, it's more about people of all ages and walks of life deciding at various points to fight back, to stand up, to speak out. I like that heroism or villainy isn't innate, that at any point, someone can make the decision to be a hero or a villain, no matter what their past history is. It's a surprisingly optimistic and heartwarming series, considering that it's about the end of the world.

If anyone's interested, I also have a more plot-based summary in the tags somewhere, as does rilina (here). Let me know if anyone else does, since I am dying to squee over this with other people!

( Spoilers! )