Review by Ian Keogh

The night before his son is due to be born, samurai Lord Daigo commits him to 48 demons in exchange for the power necessary to rule the land, and then kills the monk who’s overheard the deal. It’s certainly a downbeat start to what remains among the favourite works of Japanese creative legend Osamu Tezuka, but he draws the sequence with such dramatic energy, including imaginative statues of demons and suitably foreboding weather, that it charms in the way of a Disney film scene establishing the villain.

Daigo orders his son killed on birth, but he’s instead sent floating away down the river. Fourteen years later we see Hyakkimaru, whose arms are swords and who’s chased by the spirits of the dead. He rescues a scrappy street kid named Dororo from angry villagers, happy to let a form of demon consume them, and we learn Hyakkimaru is the baby, lacking many body parts, but gifted with incredible intuition and prosthetics. His curse is that supernatural creatures are drawn to him, but each of 48 demons he defeats restores a part of his body.

One can just imagine any American creator attempting to convince an editor this is children’s material, yet despite the grim premise, it undoubtedly is. Tezuka is such a craftsman he’s able to invest the project with a cheery optimism despite the subject matter, and treat the violence as cartoon exaggeration. And it’s funny, very funny. An early sequence has Hyakkimaru meet a grotesque blind swordsman who we see slice a fly in half down its centre with such precision that it initially rejoins and flies on before fatally separating.

Tezuka’s biography notes the inspiration for a group of injured orphans Hyakkimaru joins was the abandoned street kids he saw in Tokyo shortly after World War II, and although they only play a small part, they’re instrumental in forming Hyakkimaru’s character.

Split into eight chapters, this is an episodic series, the constants of Hyakkimaru, Dororo and assorted supernatural creatures enough for Tezuka’s prodigious imagination to devise a selection of comedic adventures. The assorted threats are brilliantly designed, each unique rather than a variation on a theme, and some demons take more than a single chapter to be brought to account. Along the way Tezuka makes a few points about inhumanity, not all of it originating with demons, and the most affecting chapter proves to be a flashback to Dororo’s infancy with its brutal depiction of abject poverty. Tezuka’s cartooning ensures it’s a character study instead of bleak tragedy. It’s so well judged.

Dororo and Hyakkimaru’s adventures continue in Volume 2, or the entire series is combined in a bulky Omnibus edition.