Billy Bat

Billy Bat is a manga made through a collaboration between the great Naoki Urasawa and Takahashi Nagasaki. The manga follows Urasawas noticeable formula, a lot of characters, a grand mystery/conspiracy, timeskips galore, main characters switching and an ending that feels less grand than what the story led you to believe (or is it?!?!). It's 165 chapters long and it was serialized in the seinen magazine Morning from 2008 to 2016.

The story spans over several millennia, but is mostly set over a span of multiple decades that have massively impacted the course of history that lead us to today, aka from world war 2 and onwards. The story begins when the main character Kevin Yamagata, a comic book artist behind the popular Billy Bat comic, finds out he unintentionally plagiarized the main character Billy Bat and that a comic of the aforementioned character already exists in Japan. He sets out to Japan to find the original and... hijinks ensue. Ok not really hijinks, more like grand conspiracies and uncovered truths behind the human history and existence.

The plot covers multiple world shaking events that are shrouded in mystery, lies and conspiracy theories to this day (like the JFK assasination and 9/11 for example) and explains them in its own way. That aspect of it really adds to the overall grandness of the story, it's not really everyday you'll read manga about so much knowledge of the modern Western, well American, culture. That said, it does make certain things feel a bit cheesy lmao. Usually Japanese works feel very self-contained to Japan, and even when set outside of it you don't really notice. But this is what Urasawa is known for, after all. Despite that, I feel like later in the story these grand mysteries and real life events almost become redundant and side-lined in favor of The Bat (tm) and his shenanigans, whereas in the first half you felt like the two were more interconnected and there was more meaning behind what was happening. I wanted for the story to be more tied to these events through the Bat dangit!!!

Suspension of disbelief is something I usually have the least problems with when reading stuff. Well, depends on the subject matter but usually I can buy into all kinds of bullshit and get into the story. However with Billy Bat, I struggled a bit. For some reason the design of this totally not Mickey Mouse being a symbol of... everything it was in the manga, and the comic itself being regarded as something mindblowing, loved by people all over the world etc. I just didn't buy it. Since we have an actual real life counterpart in the form of Disney and The Big Mouse, we all know things wouldn't have went the way they did had Mickey Mouse been the sole and biggest property of Disney for all eternity. However the last part that is happening in the future, with the water resources etc? That was believable lmfao.

The characters were alright, although I feel like more could've been done with some of them, but this is the price you pay with such an enormous cast. Jackie and her daughter were the funnest, I love comic relief in the form of an anxious goofy woman, ok? Kurusu's whole arc was really well done too, and his ending was the strongest point of the manga to me. The rest I was pretty eh on. Both Kevins didn't really make an impact on me... Hitler and Einstein stuff was hilarious though and I wish we had more of that.

Lastly, the ending. A lot of people meme on Urasawas endings but I don't remember feeling dissatisfied with Monster or 20th Century Boys... however here? Hmmmm I'm okay with it. Especially because it was directly referenced much earlier in the manga and I feel like this is a nice callback to it. It feels pretty meta but not in an annoying way.

All in all hmmmm. It was an enjoyable ride. It was good, BUT... I liked his other works more! I'm almost done with Pluto so I'll be reviewing that soon too.