20th Century Boys, Vol. 17

20th Century Boys, Vol. 17 takes place mostly in two timelines, 2018 and 2016.  In the 2018 timeline, Sanae and her brother Katsuo are on the run from the Global Defense Forces, which are mostly armed with toy lasers.  Sanae must take a message to Kanna, the daughter of Kenji's sister and perhaps the Friend.  Katsuo is looking for Father Nitani.  In the 2016 timeline, it is the first year of the Friend era.  The Friend is the President of the World following his rise from the dead and his saving the Pope from an assassin's bullet.  The virus has claimed 3 billion lives, and a strange man in a gas mask is handing out vaccines to people who attended the World Exposition in 2015.  Finally, and also in 2018 (?), Chono, the former police detective that helped Kanna, is a guard in a brutally run border town.  There is a brief return to the Kanna story.

I was glad to see Chono again; he hasn't changed, but his situation certainly has.  He was an honest officer in a corrupt police force, and now he's an honest officer in a corrupt junta.  I guess not too much has changed.  The cover actually features Kenji as a young boy in the late 1960s, and there is a brief interlude in that timeline as well.  And like I've said in the past 16 reviews of this title, I'm a huge fan of Naoki Urasawa, particularly Monster and 20th Century Boys.