Grovel

This is the second Fuzz & Pluck book, but it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read the first one (as I haven’t), since Ted Stearn introduces his characters and their current situations through short flashbacks in the first few pages of the book.

Pluck is a talking chicken with no feathers. Arrogant and a bit selfish, he’s strong-willed and resents authority. His friend Fuzz is his total opposite - a talking teddy bear who’s as warm, caring and innocent as a children’s toy should be.

In this third of the 17 Black Jack books we learn more about the world surrounding Jack. A little more is revealed about his bizarre sidekick Pinoko, who starts to seem like less of an irritant and more of a deeply strange and unusual artefact from Jack’s history. Some of the "who", "what" and "how" questions you’ll have are answered here, but most importantly there’s a "why" answered too, providing a bit of a new angle on the character.

We also get to see more of the legitimate medical world, which Jack operates outside of.

They call him the godfather of manga, and the more of Osamu Tezuka’s work that Vertical puts out, the more you can understand why.