by SE Mathews

Created on: December 08, 2008

My favorite anime of all time is "Cowboy Bebop."

That said, the manga version of Bebop is not very good.

Then there are manga titles that I adore, but I am not very fond of the anime version. I am thinking of "Full Metal Alchemist" when I am thinking of this scenario.

So when I think of my favorite manga that was turned into an anime, that is a different category than my favorite anime or my favorite manga.

My favorite anime-adapted-from-a-manga has to be Madhouse's 2004 production of Naoki Urasawa's Monster, a 74-episode series that is so faithful to the manga that it almost seems like the animation team used the manga as the storyboards.

Monster is the story of a Japanese doctor who has made his home in then-West Germany. He is an up and coming neurosurgeon at a prestigious hospital. He has a lovely fiancee who also happens to be the daughter of the hospital's director.

Dr. Kenzo Tenma is man with a natural sense of empathy. Perhaps too much empathy, but he also knows when to do what he is supposed to do. There is a day when he is set to operate on one man but is pulled to operate another man who is a famous opera singer. Tenma saves the opera singer and it brings accolades to the hospital.

Yet Tenma is shaken when he is confronted by the wife of Turkish construction worker who died at the hands of a lesser doctor. The woman yells at him in her frustration that her husband was brought in first.

The incident makes Tenma question the fairness of how treatment is doled out. As Eva, his fiancee, says, "Not all humans are equal."

When a similar scenario erupts again, Tenma makes the choice to save a young boy with a bullet to his head rather than operate on the mayor of the city.

This single act sets in motion a series of events that will forever change Kenzo Tenma as the timeline stretches from the mid-1980s to the new unified Germany to the new Czech Republic and all the secrets that are still lurking in the shadows of the Iron Curtain.

And it the middle of it, like a dark centerpiece that sucks all the light towards it, is Johan, a beautiful, enigmatic man who is as terrifying in shadows as he is revealed.

Madhouse did not just do the story of "Monster" faithfully, they added to its luster with backgrounds that are spot-on for the period, music that haunts and shivers with a story pacing that can seem deceptively slow at times and then all too fast at others.

If there is ever a series that I cannot wait to have released as a licensed product in the US so I can have it my grubby hands, it is Naoki Urasawa's Monster.

It is an incredibly long series and when I watched as a long marathon, I lost many hours of sleep in order to squeeze in one more episode for the evening.

But it was worth it.

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