Master Keaton

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Ready to travel through Europe without any need for a passport or plane tickets ? Interested in following a multifaceted man page by page while he helps people with their complicated but human dilemmas ? Look no further, Master Keaton is waiting for you.


Master Keaton is one of Naoki Urasawa's earlier works (in collaboration with Hokusei Katsushika), but despite its outstanding quality, it is nowhere near as famous as Monster or 20th Century Boys. It really should be though. Because of his incredible skills as a former member of the British SAS force, Taichi Hiraga Keaton is called to solve cases all over Europe as ... a detective for an insurance company. Each chapter contains one story, with some exceptions. The cases Keaton has to solve are very diverse, and will go from solving a murder to finding a person's loved one who disappeared. The atmospheres vary from story to story : one story will make you feel all mushy and fluffy inside and the next will make you sit on the edge of your seat, a bit scared to turn the next page. One amazing thing about this manga is that because it is not arc-based, you absolutely enjoy it while you read it, and when the volume is over you want more. But the volume never leaves you with an awful cliffhanger that will only be resolved in a couple of months.

In a detailed but not overwhelming way, we learn more about every country where Keaton travels : Germany and its Cold war-related divisions, Poland, England, Ireland, Wales, and a lot of other countries. Keaton also aspires to become a recognized archaeology teacher : through his travels and adventures he often gets to teach us about millenniums-old civilizations.
But the strength of Master Keaton is definitely its very wide range of characters. Starting with Taichi Hiraga Keaton himself of course : he’s a perfect blend of assertiveness and doubt, of wanting to pursue your dreams and pragmatism… Despite his adventures being extraordinary, he faces dilemmas that we can all relate to or that we are all going to face in the future, which keeps him from being an overly perfect character. You’ll have the pleasure to meet his adorable daughter and his womanizing-but-very-attaching father several times throughout the series, and I guarantee that you’ll always be very happy to see them in a story. What’s extremely impressive about Master Keaton is how it manages to make you emphasize with secondary characters that you will only see in one chapter for most of them, while their case is being solved. They will make angry, and then cry, and then laugh, and then mourn, and all of that in one chapter of 23-25 pages. Almost every chapter is a touching life story that feels real, that could have happened to a real person. And although a lot of the problems they face are largely often universal, they each go about these problems in their own personal way, depending on their personnality, their culture...

But this manga is not without flaws. Let’s start with the character design. If you’re familiar with Naoki Urasawa’s other works, you already know about this one. Naoki Urasawa does not have a broad range of faces for his characters, so you will see the same faces in different chapters over and over again, for different characters. It can get a bit confusing, especially in Master Keaton where you always meet new characters in every chapter, but those characters always have the same faces. Another problem that you can have is the fascination of Urasawa for the fall of the USSR and its aftermath on Germany. It is a very interesting time period indeed, with complicated questions unique to it, but a LOT of Keaton’s adventures take place in this setting. Depending on your taste, it could be tiring after a while, I’ve got to be honest.


As a conclusion, I really want to say that Master Keaton is a manga that knows there is no need for useless graphic violence and/or sex to have a mature story. It is definitely the manga you want to give to your mom or dad who thinks that anime is either too violent or only for children. It is a masterpiece that just deals with simple but immemorial human adult problems, like money, love or family, without being pretentious. Do yourself a favor, and go on an adventure with Master Keaton. Trust me, you will not regret it.

Didnt see a lot of reviews for it so i thought I will write one.

To put it very simply: Its Macguyver meets Indiana Jones. The end.

I read on Wikipedia that it can be described as "Matlock meets Jack Ryan", but i see less of that at the start.
If you have a fix for stuff like Adventures of Tintin, Batman by Denny O'Neil & Neal Adams but want a bit more mature story telling and some research like in Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese, but not that academic, then pick this one up. If you like historical mysterys like Da vinci code, then pick this ... up. Legendary Musings of Professor
Munekata? Pick this up.

Urasawa teams up with a Historian (because a lot of it is pretty well researched) and a writer of Golgo 13 to write the globe spanning adventures of Taichi Hiraga Keaton.

Usually Urasawa stories are long form where the plot hits the ground running, like in Pluto, Monster, etc. But in Master Keaton you don't have an overarching plot, just the interesting adventures of an ex-special forces university lecturer who freelances for LLoyd's of London to make ends meet.
This allows for the creators to tell a diverse breadth of stories, from negotiating a hostage rescue in England, to discovering shipwrecked treasures by the coast of Greece, to meeting ex-German nobility in Berlin. Not all of them are action packed, some wax philosophical, some are more mystery oriented, but they are all pretty damn engrossing.

So far I am at volume 3 and I am not sure if there is a plot that will eventually get shown but you can say skip volumes and still not miss out much so long as you read volume 1 to get acquainted with the characters. There are few recurring ones, Keaton's family basically, while the rest are only relevant for the story that is being told, making it one of the few Urasawa works, to my knowledge, that you can just pick up at any random point and have a good time.

Master Keaton is one of the best manga I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it.

It deviates from his other well-known works like Monster and 20th Century Boys that are all plot heavy but, retains the strong main character also present on the said series. The background themes can be heavy at times but the mood is mostly lighthearted. It’s nice to be able to enjoy Urasawa without the constant fear of unknown.

It does not follow any set plot, instead focusing Keaton's short adventures that in most cases last for a chapter. Most characters only feature for one chapter only. Keaton is a multilingual-archaeologist-SAS elite-insurance ... investigator. He's nearly a perfect human being, and yet stays humble and has his vulnerable side that keeps him approachable.

The art isn’t for everyone I guess. It definitely has variety that I think a lot of manga is lacking in though. I'm definitely a fan.

For me the key word in the series would be “relatable”. Urasawa incorporates everyday occurrences into the story and manages to end them in a moral way, and this is what makes the series stand out for me. Although you could say this applies to many manga, I’ve often found that Master Keaton is the series where I’m nodding in reaction to the events/characters’ emotion.