Characters / 20th Century Boys

WARNING: Several characters are Walking Spoilers. Open directories at your own risk.

Kenji and his former classmates

Kenji Endou

• Action Survivor: When shit starts happening, he's just an average guy with no special skills who really believes in justice. He still Jumps At The Call, because somebody has to do it, and slowly becomes a Badass.
• Anti-Hero: Starts out as a former rock guitarist now living with his mother and working at a convenience store. He later starts La Résistance, and finally becomes a Rock and Roll Messiah!
• Badass Biker: How he enters the stage at the beginning of the third arc. Of course, his Badass Bike is out of gas after a couple of panels.
• Badass Pacifist: When confronted by a self-appointed Card-Carrying Villain, who's acting as an Evil Overlord of sorts and who killed his sister's fiancee, Kenji still refuses to fight and brings him down by talking.
• Breaking Speech: During the third arc, he manages to Drive To Suicide a guy who spent his whole life trying to be a villain simply by explaining to him how pointless his way of life is and how he comes off more pathetic than menacing.
  Kenji: "It's not that easy to be evil incarnate, is it? Personally, I think it's easier to be a man of justice."
• Cool Shades: Wears them during the third arc, as part of his new Rock'n Roll persona.
• Decoy Protagonist:
  • Once the first story arc finishes, the story stops focusing on Kenji to shift to Kanna for most of the remainder of the series.
  • Subverted: During the last third of the story, after everybody finally accepted his death, he comes back to be a protagonist again.
• Determinator: His main trait, even noted as such in Friend's virtual reality game.
• The Hero: As a kid he loved heroes, always wanting to play as one in pretend games. As an adult, despite being an underachiever in his daily life, he demonstrates he is willing to be truly heroic when the situation calls for it.
• Messianic Archetype: Finds himself in the desert, spends three days simply grieving, seemingly dies and comes back to save the world?
• Not Quite Dead: At the beginning of the third arc it turns out he survived his apparent death, though he needed several years to come to terms with his failure.
• Our Hero Is Dead: At the end of the first arc. Several characters spend the whole second arc coming to terms with this.
• Significant Birth Date: August 20th. It was noted by Kanna to be the final day The Beatles recorded Abbey Road, their last album before they broke up, and why she plans an uprising against the Friends on this date.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • During the first arc he takes a couple of levels after founding La Résistance, even physically training himself.
  • When he returns for the third arc he hasn't gained any new skill, but he has pushed his Determinator trait to its extreme.

Otcho (Chouji Ochiai)

• The Atoner: After indirectly causing his son's death, he spends the rest of his life trying to atone for it.
• Badass Longcoat: He wears this all the time after his Training from Hell.
• The Berserker: In Friend's virtual reality game and occasionally in real life.
• Cool Old Guy: During the second and third arc he's visibly old, but he doesn't seem to have lost even a bit of his strength and skills.
• The Lancer: Both in his childhood and as an adult in the La Résistance. Despite being the smartest and strongest member of the group, Otcho acknowledges that Kenji is the better leader; other characters often informally treat Otcho as the second-in-command, especially when Kenji isn't there.
• Parental Neglect: He spent so little time with his family that his son thought a stranger was his father and chased him into the street, where he was hit by a car. Otcho blames hiself for his death.
• Red Baron: He's called "Shogun".
• Salaryman: Originally was one, but quit after he realized the effect his workaholism had on his family.
• Training from Hell: He went through this as part of his atonement, then used his new skills to mantain a bit of order in a very poor and unruly part of the city.

Yukiji Setoguchi

• Closer to Earth: A subversion when younger, being a rather fiery Cute Bruiser, but sort of grows into the role post-timeskip.

• Cool Old Lady: After the timeskip. Her physical strength doesn't come into play often, but her inner strength and determination are very notable to the end.
• Cute Bruiser: As a child she was the strongest of Kenji's group.
• Heir to the Dojo: By the year 2017 she has taken over the dojo in question.
• Parental Substitute: She is this to Kanna during the first timeskip, after Kenji's disappearance.
• Old Maid: Even after the timeskip it's shown that she never married.

Yoshitsune (Minamoto)

• The Chains of Commanding: He really doesn't want to be the leader after being separated from the rest of the group, especially since the job requires a great deal of pragmatism he's frankly too nice to be comfortable with.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: At first it's just regular Self-Deprecation but as time goes by and he reluctantly becomes leader of the heroes it turns into this.
• The Mole: He infiltrates Friend Land by working there as a janitor.
• Rebel Leader: After Kenji's death and Otcho's capture, he's forced into this.
• Salaryman: Before joining La Résistance he's a pretty pathetic example of this.
• Took a Level in Badass: After the timeskip he becomes legitimately badass in his own quirky way.

Maruo

• Big Eater: One of his most noticeable traits since he was a child.

• Flashback Echo: He seems to develop post-traumatic stress disorder after the Bloody New Year's Eve.
• Taking You with Me: Comes very, very close to doing this with Friend and a bomb. Remembering Kenji's words about not hurting innocents convinces him not go through with it at the very last minute.

Mon-chan (Masaki Shimon)

• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Notably averted. Every time a character enters the Virtual World, they take the time to seek him out to see him again.
• Secretly Dying: Until Bloody New Years when he reveals his illness to Yukiji.
• Your Days Are Numbered: He suffers from this during the first arc.

Yamane

• Creepy Child: When he was a kid, of course.
• Mad Scientist: He considers it a game to make as terrible a virus as possible to see how long it will take Kiriko to develop a vaccine for.
• My God, What Have I Done?: His reaction to finding out Friend planned to kill 99% of the world's population.
• Redemption Equals Death: He kills Friend to prevent the spread of the virus he created... and gets offed by Friend's forces moments later.

Keroyon

• Animal Motifs: With the frog, both in looks and name ("kero" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a frog's croak).
• Badass Normal: Lacks the kind of training that Otcho has, but still rushes into a burning factory to save lives regardless of his burns.
• Gonk: Sort of. Keroyon isn't hideous, but he has a very froglike visage.
• Refusal of the Call: Ignores Kenji's request to stop Friend, and terribly regrets it.

Fukubei

• Attention Whore: His desire to rule the world is due to him wanting to be the center of everyone's attention and admiration.
• Big Bad: He decides to be this to Kenji's Hero.
• The Bully: He was quite a jerk as a kid. Notably, he's the one directly responsible for Katsumata's Start of Darkness.
• Dead All Along: Turns out Friend did die before things started falling apart.
  • In the film version, he died in fifth grade and all his supposed appearances after that were actually Katsumata.
• Rival Turned Evil: He pushes his childhood rivalry with Kenji to utterly insane heights.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: He's fatally shot by Yamane during their reunion at the Science Lab. He's so bewildered by it that it takes him a few moments to even register that he's dying.
• Unknown Rival: He hates Kenji for getting more of his attention and vowed to defeat him. While Kenji never saw him as more than a simple classmate.

Donkey (Saburou Kido)

• Agent Scully: Even as a child he firmly believed in science over superstition.
• He Knows Too Much: What ultimately leads to his death is the fact that he happened to witness Fukubei's faked "miracle," and would know that any other resurrection he would have as Friend would be fake as well.
• The Pigpen: As a child he didn't take many baths.
• Posthumous Character: His death starts the story.

• Never Suicide: The plot is started by Kenji not believing his death to be a suicide and starting to look further into it.
• Starts with a Suicide: The story starts with his "suicide". Which is, obiviously, ''not'' a suicide.

Sadakiyo (Kiyoshi Sada)

• The Faceless: He always wears a mask and can't even remember what he looked like as a child.
• Go Out with a Smile: He dies peacefully and smiling in his bed.
• Heel–Face Turn: He starts working for Friend, but ends up betraying him.
• Heel Realization: After talking with Kyoko.
• Redemption Equals Death: Died while confronting Friend.

Yanbo and Manbo

• Fat Bastard->I Was Quite a Looker: Hilariously, they go from portly in childhood, to slim and attractive in adulthood, back to fat and ugly when they become elderly.
• Heel–Face Turn: Originally sold Kenji's group out to Friend but eventually turned against him.
• Hidden Depths: They started defecting against Friend after a longtime employee of their company died from The Virus.

• Single-Minded Twins: Up until they grew very old, they acted entirely as one.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: They don't even realize they were bullies.

Other good guys

Kanna Endou

• Almighty Janitor: waitress in a crappy restaurant who breaks up mob gunfights.
• Cunning Linguist: Dealing with various mafias has given her a command of Thai and Chinese.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The unnamed girl in the very first volume reacting in horror to Friend's robot is her post-timeskip.
• Expy: Of Nina Fortner.

• Heroic BSoD: Twice. First when she finds out that Friend is her father and again when Friend succeeds in killing 90% of the Earth's population and scattering the main characters again.
• Like Uncle Like Niece
• Luke, I Am Your Father: She's Fukubei a.k.a Friend's biological daughter.
• Messianic Archetype: Unites enemies, has unique abilities born to a "holy mother". In a subversion her father would be "the devil" in the situation, so this overlaps a bit with Anti-Anti-Christ.

• Psychic Powers: Specifically precognition, and more rarely telekinesis and mental communication.
• Rebel Leader: In the final arc.
• Ship Tease: There's some notable tension between her and Shouhei.
• Tagalong Kid: On the Bloody New Year's Eve.

'God/Kami-sama' (Kamigama Kyutaro)

• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: A homeless man with psychic powers and obsessed with bowling. He eventually uses his precognitive abilities on the stock market to become one of the richest men in Japan.

• Insistent Terminology: "Don't call me God."
• Mad Oracle: He loves to use bowling metaphors left and right but most characters acknowledge his intelligence and insight. Being an actual psychic helps too.
  • Though he himself casts some doubt on his powers, attributing them instead to the Power of Trust. It is left ambiguous.
• Magical Homeless Person: A wise homeless man with psychic powers.

• Rags to Riches: Goes from homeless man (with psychic powers) to self-made millionaire and the first Japanese person to go into space.
  • Riches to Rags: How he became homeless in the first place. He invested all his money into a bowling craze that never hits and by Year 3 of Friend, he loses it again.
• Serious Business: takes bowling very seriously.

Shouhei Chouno

• By-the-Book Cop: Was one until he discovered Friend controlled most of the police force.
• Early-Bird Cameo: An off-screen example, but he's the young grandson who's birthday party Chou-san is supposed to attend.
• Embarrassing Nickname: "Chou," pretty much the equivalent of Butterfly.
• Ensign Newbie: A detective, but incredibly inexperienced and living in his grandfather's shadow.
• Ship Tease: With Kanna.

Chou-san

• Great Detective: So great that he found the complete answer to the Driving Question of the series 21 years before anyone else.
• He Knows Too Much: With one week to retirement, he passes on all the info he's collected on Friend to a colleague. Unfortunately, said colleague turns out to be working for Friend.

• Memetic Badass: Invoked among the police force.

Kiriko

• The Atoner: Spends all of her time trying to treat people for the virus she created.

• Missing Mom: Left Kanna to Kenji shortly after she was born
• Professor Guinea Pig: Subjects herself to the experimental vaccine for the virus.

Kyoko Koizumi

• Accidental Misnaming: Her name itself isn't generally mistaken, but she's often annoyed by people claiming the "kyo" in her name means "misfortune/disaster" instead of "echo/reverberation".
• Break the Cutie: Her experience at Friend Land. Slightly subverted in that, traumatic as that was, she seemingly remains as adjusted as ever after her ordeal.
• Butt-Monkey: Provides most of the comic relief in the seriously dark series.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Well, not exactly a Badass, but she did some very important things in the series.
• The Ditz: Introduced sneaking her way to class late and clumsily signing up for the first project she points to in a book. She lives up to that first impression.
• The Gift: For... bowling, which she doesn't really like and mostly just gets her pestered by an old man.
• Girlish Pigtails: Her standard appearance, although she seems to lose it after the second Time Skip.
• Intergenerational Friendship: With Sadakiyo. This is actually one of the reasons he has a Heel–Face Turn in the first place.
  • She also has one with Yoshitsune, both the adult and the virtual version of him in the Bonus Level.
• Resigned to the Call: She eventually gives up on trying to return to a normal life once she catches on that The Call Knows Where You Live.

Father Nitani

• Tattooed Crook: Back when he was a criminal.

The Pope

• My God, What Have I Done?: Realizes sometime after Friend's "resurrection", that the man was a fake who was planning something terrible. This is what led to his near poisoning so he could be replaced with a Friend-allied clergy.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: To the point that after the second major Time Skip near the end, he's the only one close to having enough clout to match Friend's.

Shikishima

• For Science!: One of the primary reasons for making his giant robot: he thought the fake one was such a piece of crap that he felt obligated to make a real one.
  • It was probably all he had left, given he eventually realized (off-screen) that his daughter wasn't being held hostage, but had actively joined the Friends.

Haru Namio

• The Atoner: Left Kenji's band to join another and felt obligated to help him when the time comes.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Appears early on as a successful enka singer who works with Friend, Later revealed that he's protecting Maruo and helping the La Résistance covertly.

• Stepford Smiler: Subverted when he turns out to be one of the good guys. Then you realize it's probably necessary to get close to Friend.

Friend (Spoilers)

Friend^note To avoid spoilers, this will be listed separately from any other characters he may secretly be.

• The Antichrist: He is a monster, but the world believes his lies about him being some sort of Messiah and Kenji (the true Messianic Archetype) being the Big Bad. Pretty textbook, despite his non-satanic origins.
• Big Bad: Of the whole series.
• Big Bad Friend: It's even in his name.
• The Chessmaster: He has planned for everything.
• Cool Mask: No, the fact that it's a cartoon monkey mask does nothing to stifle it.
• Dark Messiah: "Our Friend! Our Friend!"
• Disproportionate Retribution: Combined with Evil Is Petty.
• Faux Affably Evil: On the surface, he seems to have a polite and classy demeanor. In reality, he is a sadistic bully and Psychopathic Manchild.
• Hidden Villain: His identity is unknown.
• Legacy Character: There are two of them.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: The first Friend is revealed to be Kanna's father.
• Manipulative Bastard: Manipulative as they get.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Especially the second one.
• Plaguemaster: His main method of mass-killing, though mostly the first one.
• Psychopathic Manchild: They never really grew up. That's why evil is so petty.
• The Sociopath: Especially the first Friend, who was manipulative, callous and egocentric ever since childhood.
• Villainous Breakdown: Has a pretty epic one when Kenji apologizes to him at the end, which makes him decide to speed up his plans to kill everyone out of spite.
• Villain with Good Publicity: And HOW! He managed to become World President and got every leader in the world eating out of his hands. Willingly.

(Other) Members and Allies of Friend's Cult

Police Officer Assassin

• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: He has a mole on his face.

Prisoner #13 (Masao Tamura)

• Heel–Face Turn: Unclear exactly when it started except when he realized the first Friend was truly dead, but he ended up helping the heroes in the very end.
• Professional Killer: Hitman for the Friend group, though he's in it for loyalty rather than money.

• Redemption Equals Death: Dies in the process of killing the second Friend.

Manjoume

• The Dragon: To Friend.
• Dead All Along: His mind was stuck in the virtual reality game and didn't realize he had died until Kenji came in and told him.

• From Nobody to Nightmare: Went from a penniless Snake Oil Salesman to the second most powerful man on the planet.
• Go Out with a Smile: His Virtual Ghost self fades away after he finally does a good deed. It's surprisingly moving considering what a dick he was for most of the series.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: He attempts to kill second Friend, only to get immediately dethroned by Takusugi. He gets his chance to genuinely help out the heroes much later.
• I Hate Past Me / My God, What Have I Done?: Only really sees the whole nature of his actions in the story when he watches his past self as a Virtual Ghost.
• I Just Want to Be Special: His ghost in the virtual reality machine claims that all he wanted to be was a somebody.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Takusugi kills him while he is in the virtual reality game. So, while his body dies, his consciousness remains there, unaware he had even been killed until someone from the real world explains everything to him. He disappears completely after attempting to preform an act of kindness.
• Redemption Equals Death: Well, technically he was already dead.
• Snake Oil Salesman: Used to sell simple nick-nacks like astronaut food on the street before he started working with Friend.
• Virtual Ghost: Becomes/makes one of these when killed while in a virtual reality game.

Takusugi

• All for Nothing: Her quest for power leads to a lot of deaths and is willing to ignore that Friend has clearly been replaced and even alleges to be pregnant with Friend's child. Then Friend announces to the world he's a phony, he's killed soon after, and she subsequently discovers that she isn't the only woman Friend slept with.
• Faux Affably Evil: Puts on a big show of being a kind Friend follower, but the joy she gets from cruelly brainwashing people is clear from moment zero.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: At one point, two characters confuse her for a man.
• Lady Macbeth: Tries to be one of these to Manjoume after the first Friend dies, but he doesn't show much interest. So she eventually kills him and takes the power for herself.
• Slasher Smile: Her trademark feature when she sentences people to Friend Land.
• The Starscream: To Manjoume.
• Stepford Smiler: When acting as a "Dream Navigator".

Moroboshi's killer

• Card-Carrying Villain: He is very insistent that's he's evil and even compares himself to many famous anime villains. Then subverted when Kenji gets him to admit he's full of it.
• Driven to Suicide: He tries to off himself with a gun when Kenji makes him realize he's not as monstruous as he'd like to think, but is stopped.
• No Name Given: Despite Kenji's best efforts to learn it.

• Professional Killer: Although, as Kenji points out, its possible the only person he has killed was Moroboshi. Everything else was delivering orders.

• Reused Character Design: He has the face and hair of Johan Liebert from Monster.
• Villainous Breakdown: When he realizes Kenji isn't going to give him the grand confrontation he craves, his smug villain act vanishes completely.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Invoked after the second Time Skip, leaning into his villain persona.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: His fate is never explained. He might have been killed when the tower was stormed.

Shikishima's Daughter

• Brainwashed and Crazy: A realistic example. Seduced and manipulated from a young age, she became a firm believer of Friend's ideology and will do anything to support it. To the point she goes Omnicidal Maniac in the final arc, attempting to follow through on Friend's vision.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Reappears after eighteen years of irrelevance to make a final attempt to complete the second Friend's doomsday plot.
• Damsel in Distress: Invoked. She's seduced in order for Friend's group to force Shikishima to build a robot... but she's willingly going along with Friend.
• No Name Given: Just like her lover.
• Villainous Breakdown: She can't cope with Friend's confession that he faked everything and instigates the final battle because otherwise she's wasted her life.

Spoiler Character

Katsumata

• Creepy Child: Creepy as a child, creepy as an adult.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Takes up the mantle of Friend after Fukubei dies.
• Disproportionate Retribution: His motive for becoming a tyrannical despot and planning to destroy the world? To spite Kenji over a childhood incident where he stole a prize at a candy store and Katsumata became the scapegoat, despite Kenji having no idea what happened or any role in Katsumata's bullying.
• Evil Is Petty: And how. Katsumata kills 99% of the world population because of something that happened in the fifth grade. Even after Kenji apologizes to him, he refuses to accept it purely because the act of doing so would go against his worldview.
• The Faceless: We never actually see his face before he underwent plastic surgery to look like Fukubei. In the virtual reality game, he simply has no face.
• Forgotten Character: Before he became Friend, he was forgotten and even faceless.
• Freudian Excuse: Katsumata was desperately lonely, he devoted his life to Fukubei's plan because he was the only one who would acknowledge him at all.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: And how. In fact, it is because he was almost literally nobody that he became a nightmare.
• Psychic Powers: Near the end of the series it's implied that he has the same kind of powers as "God", having seen the end of the entire series in a dream while he was still a child, which is why he wrote it down in the New Book of Prophecy.
• Psychopathic Manchild: This trait is one of the few things that first differentiates him from Fukubei.
• Start of Darkness: Several factors lead to him to becoming the second Friend.
• Straw Nihilist: His severe bullying and ostracization resulted in Katsumata believing that the world was "unnecessary" and wanting to destroy it all.
• Walking Spoiler