His pain and confusion are constant, and the desire to see his loyalty and faith finally rewarded drove my reading. Tezuka achieves this by spending the most time with Toge and his nearly constant physical trials. Message to Adolf is a pocket saga in which multiple storylines intersect and intertwine, with a plot that takes the characters across Germany and Japan but never loses the intimacy and tension of a more modest drama. All of this is further complicated by Toge’s return to the city, and the violence that follows in his wake as the authorities seek to silence evidence that could bring down the Third Reich.Īnd that’s only the first half.
Their friendship confounds and threatens the city’s political and social structures, and later gets tested when the younger Adolf’s father sends him to a Hitler Youth school in Germany. Meanwhile, in Kobe, Japan, the son of the Nazi-affiliated German ambassador befriends the son of a Jewish expat baker, both of them named Adolf.
Toge believes Isao was killed by the Nazis to cover up information he’d tried to pass on to his older brother, and his search for the truth leads him into conflict with Nazi officials, Japanese police, gangsters, and an underground resistance movement. Sohei Toge, a Japanese journalist covering the Berlin Olympics, is drawn into a political mystery when his brother Isao, a student, is murdered. Set in Germany and Japan during the build-up to World War II, Message to Adolf: Part One follows three characters wrestling with the threat of Nazism, and the impending war, and reaching different conclusions. Manga godfather Tezuka seems to grab at genres and narrative styles and bundle them together, such that his tale is a conspiracy thriller, soap opera, coming of age story, history essay, and slapstick comedy all at once. The garish, pop art design promises irony, even as the actual images suggest a more sincerely terrible read. A bright orange close-up of Adolf Hitler’s face takes up the entire front cover, and the title, bright yellow across a lime green spine, is written in what I believe to be High German font (font nerds, please correct me). I picked up part one of Vertical, Inc.’s reissue of Osamu Tezuka’s Message to Adolf solely because of its striking, disconcerting presentation.
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