BlackJack Shot First

I am being very careful in my choice of words in calling BlackJack the predecessor to medical procedural dramas like House M.D. or comedies like Scrubs. BlackJack was not the creator of this style of storytelling, as the format is reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th and 20th century. Rather it is a spiritual successor to that style of storytelling - with our main character solving different self contained stories each chapter - created by the father of manga himself, Osamu Tezuka.
BlackJack is a very simple story, with the titular character, BlackJack, going around and solving his patients’ problems every chapter (or rather from the chapters I read) and it is easy to write it off because everything about it seems so basic. As the spiritual sequel to Holmes this can make the stories of Blackjack seem lesser by comparison, as Sherlock Holmes stories had a lot of moving parts, with every page Doyle writes containing as many different as he can cram into each plot, however the important thing to note is both the medium in which BlackJack is told and its impact on popular media in the future.
Going in order of the list above, BlackJack is, in essence, a comic book, and as such has much less time to set up and full develop its plots when compared to shows like House, which have half an hour to an hour to full flesh out its themes and ideas, as opposed to BlackJack’s 20 pages. Unless Tezuka was willing to bloat his stories with pages filled with words, Tezuka instead focuses in on the simplicity and breaks his stories down to their barest parts, saying everything he needs to say while maintaining a style of storytelling that makes every page of BlackJack easy and enjoyable to read.
The other thing to note about BlackJack is its impact of American media. BlackJack is a hugely influential story in Japan, however its impact in American seems nonexistent. It’s the kind of event where its impact goes largely unnoticed, but I believe BlackJack has had some impact on the existence of the medical procedural, since it was one of the earliest pioneers of the genre. Without it there’s no telling if House M.D. or Scrubs would have been made, and that doesn’t sound like much, but leave it to Tezuka to literally create a new genre of story even with one of his (compared to Astro Boy) lesser known series.