Case Closed (Vol. 2) by Gosho Ayoama

Gosho Ayoama. Case Closed. Vol. 2. 1994. San Francisco: VIZ, 2004.

Case Closed is a collection of short detective stories in comic form (manga). They were originally published in Japan under the title “Meitantei Conan” (Detective Conan). That is the straightforward part.

The hero is a teenager with a genius for solving crime, Jimmy Kudo. He stumbles onto something and a crime organization poisons him. Instead of killing him, the drug shrinks him down to the size of a first grader. He commits himself to finding the men who did it. To protect himself and his friends for the criminals who think he is dead, he takes on the name Conan Edogawa (from mystery authors Conan Doyle and Rumpo Edogawa) and takes up with his unsuspecting girlfriend, Rachel, and her father, mediocre private investigator Richard Moore. To get this back-story, you’ll need to read the first volume or see early episodes of the anime series that closely follows the manga.



Other than that, the stories are straightforward tales of ratiocination in the Western tradition started by Edgar Allen Poe and taken up so well by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. For someone interested in getting familiar with manga, Japanese comics, this may be a good place to start. The mystery story is familiar to Westerners and the art is in the manga style.

This particular volume has three stories. Gosho Ayoama’s method is to present a complete mystery story and occasionally include stories that touch on Jimmy’s broader quest to return to his normal size and bring his shrinkers to justice. You don’t have to be invested in the larger story to enjoy reading the individual mysteries.

Though Jimmy appears to be a young child, and has adventures with kids from his elementary school class, the stories are not for children. There is murder and other crimes, violence and gore, and children in imminent danger. Conan has a particular knack for provoking killers into coming after him.