I wanted to say to that I have been reading through everyone’s comments and noticed the main concern is everyone is confused as to why johan dressed as a girl as a child. I have the answer to this. If you really payed attention you realize that the mother was trying to escape with her twins from the scientists. The scientists would have know to look for a woman with two small children the same age one boy and one girl. The mother, to make them less noticible dressed Johan up as a girl too. So she would appear to have identical twin girls rather than fraternal twins boy and girl. This would make people not question who she and her children are.

It’s been years now, but I was under the impression that Johan’s mother dressed the twins as girls because they were in hiding. The people after them were looking for a woman with twins, a boy and a girl. So the mother dressed both of them as girls and only took one out of the house at a time, presenting the illusion of a woman with one daughter. I considered this a huge mindfuck a the time.

Overall I felt satisfied by the ending. Tenma’s decision to save Johan after a year of hunting him frustrated me, but I would have been more frustrated if Tenma had allowed him to die. For me, the series was about Tenma’s inner conflict with his nobler instincts. In the end, the noblest impulse of all wins out, even though it was all for nothing (Johan’s escape). For some reason, this felt worth it to me. Tenma can’t control Johan and he also can’t compromise himself, so this is the only possible ending.

so i thought i understood the ending. can anyone confirm that which kid was taken to 511 at the end? i thought it was anna who got taken into 511, and later shared her experience with johan. johan then turned into a monster… can someone confirm that? thanks.

To me, the point of that whole thing was that it was that the ambiguity of their mother’s decision (IE: Did she know which child she was sacrificing, or did she not know? And in either case, which child was it she didn’t need? Was it that she wanted to save Johann, but mistook him for Anna, or that she wanted to save Anna, and was conscious of which one she was sacrificing?) the real catalyst for Johann’s transformation… as I believe it was also established that the Kinderheim 511 experiments were NOT what actually made Johann a monster… he was a monster to begin with.

I’m not as bothered by the fact that Franz Bonaparta’s “lessons” were never concretely revealed… something like that seems to be better left ambiguous, otherwise people could just argue, “Oh, that’s BULLSHIT! That’d never actually work!” It’s just a McGuffin… it doesn’t actually matter what the specifics of the lessons were, as long as you get the gist of it. Knowing the specifics neither adds or detracts from the plot for me.

Personally, I was more bothered by the pacing of the ending, as that final mindfuck moment seems rather abrupt, and then the last page was just completely unnessesary to me (though, for the life of me, I can’t think of anything better, so it’s hard to criticize… at least the entire series wasn’t all a dream!).

Overall, I enjoyed the series as a complete work, and the ending, while not entirely perfect, does nothing to detract from the series as a whole. MONSTER is a really solid piece of fiction.

That said, I definately don’t consider it Naoki Urasawa’s best work in the least! 20TH CENTURY BOYS is a VAST improvement, taking everything he learned over the course of MONSTER and honing it even further… having re-read the first volume just last week, after having read all but the final volume of the series, I cannot BELIEVE how much he sets up in that first volume that doesn’t pay off for what would have been YEARS at the time. There are some plot points in that first volume that don’t pay off until the 18 or 19th volume! I just can’t wrap my mind around how far thinking he must have been to have planned all that out. And, amazingly enough, PLUTO is even an improvement on THAT.

Naoki Urasawa is definitely one of my favorite mangaka of all time, if not just one of my favorite overall creators, and I’m so happy to see his work finding an audience in North America.

There’s an obvious biblical twist in there, so maybe I’m projecting something into this considering it’s a Japanese work, but that’s what I got out of the ending, and that’s why for me it worked.

Both Johan and Anna being dressed as girls as children was also an odd thing tossed in. Well said that it felt like a surprise for surprise’s sake. The scene where the Mother hesitated about giving up one of them made me think that she knew they wanted Anna, and that perhaps she wanted her daughter over her son, so she dressed them both as girls, believing she could tell them apart well enough to hand over Johan. I think Johan felt this may’ve been the case as well, as it seemed during his short conversation with Dr. Tenma at the end.

So many little questions in the end, but ultimately it’s a testiment to the series as a whole just how little they diminish a readers’ overall positive sense of the series (or mine anyway).

I understand that Johann didn’t ask to be made into a soulless, manipulative, child-murdering sociopath, but the last few pages try really, really hard to hammer home that point.

It just seems unnecessary.

Otherwise I really liked the last volume (and not just because it was 250 pages for $10!); I loved to see Inspector Lunge interacting with Wolfgang Grimmer and of course, Dr. Tenma finally.

Also: I didn’t realize how much of the comic is a grand-scale celebration of food and the sharing of it with friends. It seems like the only time anyone is really happy in Monster is when they’re eating sausage or Tenma’s Japanese cooking.