Comics god Osamu Tezuka's darkest work MW is a chilling picaresque of evil. Steering clear of
the supernatural as well as the cuddly designs and slapstick humor that enliven many of
Tezuka's better-known works MW explores a stark modern reality where neither divine nor
secular justice seems to prevail. This willfully "anti-Tezuka" achievement from the master's
own pen nevertheless pulsates with his unique genius. Michio Yuki has it all: looks
intelligence a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family a promising career at a major
bank legions of female admirers. But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with
the power to shake the world to its foundations. During a boyhood excursion to one of the
southern archipelagos near Okinawa Yuki barely survived exposure to a poison gas stored at a
foreign military facility. The leakage annihilated all of the island's inhabitants but was
promptly covered up by the authorities leaving Yuki as an unacknowledged witness--one whose
sense of right and wrong however the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate. Now fifteen
years later Yuki is a social climber of Balzacian proportions infiltrating the worlds of
finance and politics by day while brutally murdering children and women by night--perversely
using his Kabuki-honed skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women he's
killed. His drive however will not be satiated with a promotion here and a rape there. Michio
Yuki has a far more ominous objective: obtaining MW the ultimate weapon that spared his life
but robbed him of all conscience. There are only two men with any hope of stopping him: one a
brilliant public prosecutor who struggles to build a case against the psychopath the other a
tormented Catholic priest Iwao Garai who shares Yuki'ls past--and frequently his bed.
Serialized beginning in 1976 in Big Comic magazine where Tezuka's trailblazing medical
thriller Ode to Kirihito had appeared a few years earlier MW probes the complexities of
homoeroticism as well as the reality of extensive U.S. military presence in Japan. The result
is as bracing today as it was thirty years ago. "Darker than you think-than you want to think
[…] MW took on the stuff of today's headlines some thirty years ago." -The Agony Column "MW is
the newest of those masterpieces to be translated into English and like everything else with
[Tezuka's] name on it you are cheating yourself out of one of the best graphic novels out
right now if you don't read it." -Advanced Media Network "Tezuka spins an entertaining
slightly preposterous yarn serving up more plot twists car chases and gender-bending costume
changes than Dressed to Kill and The Manchurian Candidate combined." -popcultureshock "You'll
stare at the page eyes popping and muttering 'I cannot believe I just read that.' But you did
and it worked and you turn the page." -David Welsh Comic World News
