20th Century Boys is Naoki Urasawa's award-winning seinen manga, serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits from 1999 to 2006 and collected into twenty-two volumes: the story of a group of childhood friends who once invented a secret symbol for their neighborhood clubhouse, only to watch it resurface decades later as the emblem of an apocalyptic cult led by a shadowy figure known only as "the Friend." This is Band 11 of that original numbering — corresponding to Viz's English-language Volume 11 — and it lands at the series' narrative midpoint.
Here, Kanna is confronted with the possibility that the Friend is her own father, forcing her to decide whether she can still stand and fight while reeling from the news. Elsewhere, Koizumi Kyoko and Sadakiyo narrowly escape the Friend's "Dream Navigators," who are determined to hunt them down. Interwoven flashbacks return to the summer of 2002, when the reporter known as Mon-chan finally got Sadakiyo to commit the truth about the Friend to paper — the so-called "Mon-chan Memo" — and to what lengths Sadakiyo went to keep it hidden, unraveling more of the long-buried "Lie of 1970" along the way.
Marketed for older teens and adults on account of its violence and heavy themes, this volume continues the sprawling, mystery-box plotting and large ensemble cast that critics have singled out as the series' defining strength.
