Revisiting one of Naoki Urasawa's works and i have to say either this series, Master Keaton or 20th Century Boys is this legendary mangaka magnum opus. Monster is one of the well regarded Seinen Manga because it has one of the best antagonist who just relies on his pure intellect. The series tells the story of a Japanese Surgeon in German whose life turned upside down after he saves a young boy named Johan Liebert who is gifted with a bright mind but used it to manipulate people for grisly ends.
As the main antagonist of Monster, Johan Liebert is well made character comparable to Makishima Shogo or Hannibal Lecter, who due to his traumatic past mostly commit his evil act by manipulating others through his eloquence and intimate understanding of human psyche. But what sets apart Johan with the latter two, is that he is not in the point of no return yet. From what i am able to grasp, before reaching that point of becoming true psychopath monster and to prove his point, Johan probably decided to end his life in a most elaborate way possible which the main protagonist rebuked by sentencing him to life at the conclusion of this series.
Beyond his facade as a villain, to me Johan is a troubled young man who turned into sociopath due to being a victim of unethical cold war experiment. Usually when a person exposed to extremely traumatic experience, they tend to develop deranged personality as coping mechanism when Insanity was the only alternative in which Monster tried to showcase Naoki Urasawa's take on this argument. In the end at its basic level, what i believe that Monster tried to convey is that it is up to a society to determine how deep a man can sunk so low, because people are always the product of their environment.
