Black Jack, as some of you may remember from last year, was created by Osamu Tezuka. It is about a brilliant surgeon without a license to practice and who charges exorbitant prices. Rather than tell you what it's about, here's a little anecdote.

The anime magazine Animage reviews a bunch of OVAs every month, with a panel of manga artists and writers as judges. The rankings go like this:

5 stars: Don't just rent it! You want to own it personally!
4 stars: Definitely recommended, just watch it.
3 stars: Worth seeing.
2 stars: To kill time when you're bored.
1 star: Homework is more important.

One of the judges, a manga artist named Asari Yoshitoo, is known as the harshest one. He rarely gives more than 3 stars, usually gives 1 or 2, and even insults them at times with comments like, "I bet none of the staff made it with certainty about how, where, or when it should have been interesting."

Black Jack 6 was reviewed in the July 1996 issue. Not only did Asari give it 4 stars, it also got 5 stars from 3 people and 3 from the last (another hard grader). They praised the director, Dezaki, for incorporating his own style into Tezuka's work, turning it into an artform, as opposed to merely an unoriginal regurgitation of the manga.