20th Century Boys

Naoki Urasawa builds his mysteries out of ordinary middle-aged men, and 20th Century Boys is his biggest. A washed-up convenience-store clerk named Kenji starts to suspect that a masked cult leader called Friend is using a secret world-ending scenario that Kenji and his friends drew up as bored children in 1969. The story jumps across decades, from a sun-warmed boyhood summer to a near-future Tokyo under the cult's control, and it keeps asking who Friend really is. Urasawa's plotting is intricate and his faces are unusually expressive for a thriller. The mystery sprawls, sometimes past the point of full payoff, but the ride has few equals.