Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Vol.1
Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka
Viz Media
Reviewed By Amy Chop
Astro Boy was a part of so many people’s childhood it’s often forgotten by North Americans that it was created by a Japanese man in 1952. For most of us, we remember the animated series we watched throughout the 1980s with its bright colours and mouths that didn’t move in sync with the voices. But after seeing the Japanese evolve Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka’s big eyes/small mouth style into one of the most sophisticated animating designs on modern television and film, its hard to imagine any way to make Astro Boy better.
Enter Naoki Urasawa, Tezuka’s heir to the manga king throne. Urasawa’s fame was sealed with his series Monster, which was one of the most popular psycho thriller mangas of all time. No one could be better to re-imagine the “World’s Greatest Robot” storyline from the Astro Boy manga as a fast paced and interesting detective story.
The main character is not Atom (the actual name of Astro, translated poorly by Americans) but instead Detective Geischt as he uncovers who is behind the deaths of some of the world’s most powerful and respected robots. The robots in Pluto are both human-looking and not; some can pass and some are void of all emotion. Geischt, a European, begins an investigation that takes him around the world, beginning in the Alps with the death of a war hero who became beloved as a pacifist in his later years. He is taken from Europe to Japan where he warns Atom, the most advanced robot in the world, that he may be on the hit list of whomever is behind the attacks.
Urasawa’s style makes the story of Pluto more serious than the original. His art is powerful and smooth reading with no confusion in the course of the right-to-left reading pages. This is a series for anyone wanting to relive their favourite kid show but with a more adult twist. Readers should not be afraid of the manga format, black and white and small scale, it is still a comic book just created in a slightly different way. The story in Pluto is so good that you won’t be able to put it down before you’ve come to the end of each volume, and trust me you won’t see them coming. It’s too good a series to pass up.
Amy Chop is the manager of The Dragon based in Old Quebec Street in Downtown Guelph
