A Japanese-American cartoonist in postwar America discovers that his hit comic-strip character, a wisecracking bat, may not be his invention. The same bat keeps surfacing across history, near assassinations and turning points, drawn by different hands who never met. Urasawa and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki run this across twenty volumes and several centuries, weaving in real events like the Kennedy assassination and figures like Walt Disney stand-ins. It is a conspiracy thriller about authorship, influence, and whether anyone ever owns an idea. The plotting is dense and sometimes overreaches, but the central image, a small black bat that outlives everyone who draws it, sticks with you.
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