Monster (manga)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Monster opens with a choice that changes several lives at once. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital in Düsseldorf, West Germany, is engaged to Eva Heinemann, the hospital director's daughter. Then fraternal twins Johan and Anna Liebert are brought in after a massacre, Johan with a gunshot wound to the head. Minutes later the city's mayor arrives, also in critical condition, and Tenma is ordered to treat him first. Tenma disobeys and operates on Johan instead. Johan survives. The mayor does not. Tenma's engagement ends, his career stalls, and his colleagues turn against him. Soon after, Director Heinemann and several doctors who had opposed Tenma are found murdered, and the twins vanish without a trace. No evidence ever ties Tenma to the killings. Years later, the boy he saved is grown, and Tenma will spend years crossing Germany trying to learn what he set loose. What kind of person had he saved? Why would a Japanese manga artist set his story in West Germany rather than Japan? And why, decades after it began, would Hollywood option this story twice and finish neither version?

• 2. A Killer's Code

  ›

  At the 511 Kinderheim, an orphanage in East Germany, children were shaped through psychological manipulation and twisted literature as part of a secretive eugenics project. Johan Liebert emerged from that program as a calculating killer. He murders anyone who has seen his face, enforcing total anonymity to prove a nihilistic philosophy. His killings are not random; they form pieces of a larger scheme built to spread chaos. As Tenma investigates, he uncovers victim after victim: former Kinderheim inmates, investigators, and ordinary civilians who crossed Johan's path. Confronting a killer this deliberate raises a question Tenma cannot avoid: whether stopping Johan will force him to become a killer himself.

• 3. The Surgeon's Long Chase

  ›

  Chief of Surgery once again years later, Tenma treats a criminal named Adolf Junkers, who cryptically warns him about a monster before vanishing. When Tenma visits Junkers again, the guard is dead and the patient is gone. He tracks him to a construction site and finds Johan, now a young man, holding Junkers at gunpoint. Tenma pleads for Junkers's life, but Johan executes him anyway, then coldly tells Tenma he would never harm the man who once saved him. Tenma realizes that his act of mercy years earlier freed a remorseless killer into the world. Now a suspect in a string of murders, he draws the attention of BKA Inspector Heinrich Lunge, who pursues him as the prime culprit. Tenma seeks out Anna, who now lives as Nina Fortner with an adoptive family and suffers recurring nightmares. On her birthday he warns her that Johan has returned, but he cannot stop Johan from murdering her adoptive parents, retraumatizing her. The chase carries Tenma across Germany and beyond, dodging both the authorities and Johan's own followers. It becomes less an investigation than an attempt at redemption, pitting Tenma against the very evil he once saved.

• 4. From The Fugitive To Germany

  ›

  Around 1986, Naoki Urasawa pitched his editor an idea for a manga about the medical field, and could tell right away the man didn't like it. So he joked instead about a story on women's judo, and that offhand suggestion became his first solo work, Yawara!, which ran from 1986 to 1993. The real seed for Monster came from somewhere else entirely: the 1960s American television series The Fugitive, which had struck Urasawa hard when he watched it at age eight. In that show a doctor, wrongly convicted of murder, escapes and hunts for the real killer while the police hunt him. His editor was adamant Monster would not do well and tried to talk him out of writing it. Urasawa set the story in Germany because the Japanese medical field had long been shaped by German professional practice, and he chose the post-war era specifically so the neo-Nazi movement could be woven into the plot. When the semimonthly Monster launched at the end of 1994, Urasawa was already writing Happy! on a weekly schedule and kept serializing both at once. After Happy! ended in 1999 he started the weekly 20th Century Boys. The strain from overlapping deadlines did not stop him from finishing both series in full.

• 5. Ink And Deadlines

  ›

  Big Comic Original carried Monster's chapters from December 1994 until the 20th of December 2001. Shogakukan gathered the 162 chapters into 18 tankōbon volumes, released between the 30th of June 1995 and the 28th of February 2002. Takashi Nagasaki is credited as co-producer of the manga's story. In 2002 Urasawa also wrote and illustrated Another Monster, a novel retelling the same events through the eyes of an investigative reporter. Shogakukan later revisited the series with a nine-volume kanzenban re-release between the 30th of January and the 29th of August 2008. Viz Media licensed Monster for North America, publishing all 18 volumes between the 21st of February 2006 and the 16th of December 2008, and later released the kanzenban as Monster: The Perfect Edition between the 15th of July 2014 and the 19th of July 2016. By then, Madhouse had already adapted the manga into a 74-episode anime television series that would carry Monster far beyond print.

• 6. Bringing Monster To Screen

  ›

  Madhouse's adaptation aired between the 7th of April 2004 and the 28th of September 2005 on Nippon TV, directed by Masayuki Kojima and written by Tatsuhiko Urahata. Character designs came from Kitarō Kōsaka, a longtime Studio Ghibli animator, adapted for the series by Shigeru Fujita. Kuniaki Haishima composed the score, including the opening theme "Grain." David Sylvian was commissioned to write the first ending theme, "For the Love of Life," collaborating with Haishima on the track. In the soundtrack's cover notes, Sylvian said he was drawn to the material by "the moral dilemma faced by its central character." He described the music's calm surface giving way to "darker undercurrents, signifying the conscience of the lead protagonist and the themes of morality, fate, resignation, and free will." That theme ran for the first 32 episodes. Fujiko Hemming's "Make It Home" took over for the remaining 42 episodes, the only song she performed in her entire career. The opening credits also featured illustrations from a fictional book, Obluda, Která Nemá Své Jméno, or The Monster Who Didn't Have A Name, attributed to Emil Scherbe and published by Shogakukan on the 30th of September 2008.

  Viz Media, which held the North American license, commissioned Salami Studios to produce an English dub. It aired on Syfy's Ani-Mondays beginning the 12th of October 2009, airing two episodes back to back each Monday night at 11 pm Eastern, and also ran on the sister network Chiller. A DVD box set covering the first 15 episodes came out on the 8th of December 2009, but poor sales led Viz to cancel plans for further releases and eventually drop the license altogether. The series later aired on Canada's Super Channel starting the 15th of March 2010, and on the Funimation Channel from the 3rd of April 2010. Siren Visual picked up the Australian license in 2013, releasing the show across five DVD volumes beginning that November. Netflix began streaming Monster worldwide on the 1st of January 2023, with the first 30 episodes available immediately and the rest of the series following within the month. In August 2025, Discotek Media announced it had licensed the series for a Blu-ray release planned for 2026.

• 7. Hollywood's Unmade Monster

  ›

  In 2005, New Line Cinema acquired the rights to adapt Monster into an American live-action film. Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Josh Olson, known for A History of Violence, was hired to write the screenplay. No further news about that film has surfaced since. In 2013, word emerged that Guillermo del Toro and the American network HBO were developing a pilot for a live-action television version instead. Stephen Thompson, a co-executive producer known for his work on Doctor Who and Sherlock, was announced as the pilot's writer, with del Toro attached to direct and executive produce alongside Don Murphy and Susan Montford. By 2015, del Toro told Latino-Review that HBO had passed on the project, and that the team was pitching it to other studios instead.

• 8. Critics' Verdict

  ›

  In 1997, Monster won an Excellence Prize in the Manga Division at the first Japan Media Arts Festival. Two years later it took the Grand Prize of the 3rd Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, and in 2001 the 46th Shogakukan Manga Award in the General category. In 2004 it won Best Manga Series at the Lucca Comics Awards. The Young Adult Library Services Association placed Monster on its 2007 "Great Graphic Novels for Teens" list, and Viz Media's English release picked up several Eisner Award nominations, including two nods for Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Japan and three for Best Continuing Series. In a 2009 Oricon poll asking Japanese readers which manga they wanted adapted into live action, Monster placed fifth, and that same year the organizers of Anime Expo gave it the award for Best Drama Manga. The manga has had over 20 million copies in circulation.

  Writing for Time, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz said, "Urasawa is a national treasure in Japan, and if you ain't afraid of picture books, you'll see why." Anime News Network's Carl Kimlinger called him a master of suspense and described the artwork as "invisible perfection," never "showy or superfluous." About.com's Deb Aoki called the manga a multi-layered mystery that stands up to repeat readings, though sometimes "a little hard to follow." IGN's A.E. Sparrow compared it to "a Hitchcock film set to manga." Not every review was uncomplicated. Anime News Network's Casey Brienza felt the series spent too much time developing minor characters "who are likely to be dead or forgotten just a few dozen pages later," and that its ending "went out with a whimper."

  The anime drew its own praise. THEM Anime Reviews called it "complex" and "beautiful," citing "sophisticated storytelling and complex plot weaving." Otaku USA's Darius Washington named Monster one of the ten best anime of its decade. Kimlinger, reviewing the anime as well, wrote that it was hard to overstate how far the series stood apart from the anime mainstream, calling it "unsettling, fiercely intelligent" and "uncategorizable." He praised the adaptation's fidelity, noting there was not "a line of dialogue changed or omitted" from the manga. Fans still waiting to own a physical copy will get one in 2026, when Discotek Media releases Monster on Blu-ray for the first time.