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starladyUrasawa Naoki with Tezuka Osamu. Pluto. 8 vols. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2003-09.
I am not a particular follower of the God of Manga, for reasons that became clear to me all over again after I read the episode of Tetsuwan Atomu ("Chijô ni Saidai Robotto") on which this manga is based. Urasawa, however, is an unabashed Tezuka fan, to the point where the protagonist of his first megahit, Monster, is (one suspects) named after Atom's creator, Dr. Tenma. Pluto is an authorized retelling of that episode of Tetsuwan Atomu, begun in 2003 to coincide with the date of Atom's birth in-manga.
For those who don't know, Tetsuwan Atom | Astro Boy is the world's greatest robot, created by the world's greatest robot engineer after the death of Prof. Tenma's biological son Hibio. It being the 1960s, and Tezuka being a relentlessly saccharine storyteller, at least until the late 1960s, in Tetsuwan Atomu all of these developments are treated as being completely hunky-dory. In Urasawa's retelling, however, the beating heart of twisted love and grief and hatred that powers the story is sliced open and laid bare, and Pluto is an incomparably stronger manga for it.
The bare bones of the story are the same in both versions: one by one, the world's seven strongest robots are being murdered, for reasons that are revealed to have something to do with the fall of the dictator of a certain West Asian country that Urasawa calls Persia. Whereas Tezuka's protagonist is Atom, however, Urasawa's protagonist is the German Interpol inspector robot Gesicht, a crucial change that allows Urasawa to tell a far more complex story, though his Atom is much older and much less naïve and childish than Tezuka's too, for all that he looks like a human kid from the outside.
In fact, most of the robots in the manga look human, and the question of robot rights, the Three Laws of Robotics (thanks, Isaac Asimov!), robot adoption of child robots, and the final limits of artificial intelligence is very much a live issue in the manga. What separates humans and robots is of great concern too, and whether robots can feel various unseemly emotions such as hatred and rage winds up to be of great relevance to the plot.
I honestly found it hard to read the relevant portion of Tetsuwan Atomu, simply because it's so incoherent on the level of story and lacks almost all character development and characterization that I had a hard time understanding how I was supposed to be reading it and what I was supposed to be getting out of it. But as far as manga has come since 1964, and as much as Urasawa is now able to make 2044 look much more plausible to 2011 eyes, in the end I was struck by how much Urasawa didn't have to change. Deposed leaders of Middle Eastern countries that have been forcibly converted to democracy? That doesn't sound familiar at all, and it was just as relevant fifty years ago as it is today.
All of which is me bringing myself to address the fact that when I give you that description you may well think Egypt or Tunisia or Libya, but Urasawa was thinking Iraq, and the thinness with which he veils his critique of American imperialism in that country is, for me at least, like perpetually missing a stair. Darius XIV, the deposed dictator of Persia, even looks like Saddam Hussein, and the attitude of the not!United States, its arrogant military personnel and its smarmy President, is basically clipped straight from the headlines. The final volume of the manga even centers around the possible eruption of the not!Yellowstone volcano.
So there's that, and one wonders if that's why there was no anime adaptation of this story, unless Tezuka Productions somehow raised an objection. The other thing that Urasawa doesn't change is the gender balance. Though he does give Atom's sister Uran an expanded role, it's entirely based on her extraordinarily high degree of empathetic intuition, and no adult female character, human or robot, plays any sort of central role; they're mostly wives, mothers, and servants. I did spend a good while thinking that the pacifist Australian robot Epsilon was female, but that was entirely my own gender stereotypes tripping me up. Silly Electra, only boys and men can have adventures!
That said, Urasawa is a modern master of the medium, and I have to recommend this series extraordinarily highly, just like all his others.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.
I am not a particular follower of the God of Manga, for reasons that became clear to me all over again after I read the episode of Tetsuwan Atomu ("Chijô ni Saidai Robotto") on which this manga is based. Urasawa, however, is an unabashed Tezuka fan, to the point where the protagonist of his first megahit, Monster, is (one suspects) named after Atom's creator, Dr. Tenma. Pluto is an authorized retelling of that episode of Tetsuwan Atomu, begun in 2003 to coincide with the date of Atom's birth in-manga.
For those who don't know, Tetsuwan Atom | Astro Boy is the world's greatest robot, created by the world's greatest robot engineer after the death of Prof. Tenma's biological son Hibio. It being the 1960s, and Tezuka being a relentlessly saccharine storyteller, at least until the late 1960s, in Tetsuwan Atomu all of these developments are treated as being completely hunky-dory. In Urasawa's retelling, however, the beating heart of twisted love and grief and hatred that powers the story is sliced open and laid bare, and Pluto is an incomparably stronger manga for it.
The bare bones of the story are the same in both versions: one by one, the world's seven strongest robots are being murdered, for reasons that are revealed to have something to do with the fall of the dictator of a certain West Asian country that Urasawa calls Persia. Whereas Tezuka's protagonist is Atom, however, Urasawa's protagonist is the German Interpol inspector robot Gesicht, a crucial change that allows Urasawa to tell a far more complex story, though his Atom is much older and much less naïve and childish than Tezuka's too, for all that he looks like a human kid from the outside.
In fact, most of the robots in the manga look human, and the question of robot rights, the Three Laws of Robotics (thanks, Isaac Asimov!), robot adoption of child robots, and the final limits of artificial intelligence is very much a live issue in the manga. What separates humans and robots is of great concern too, and whether robots can feel various unseemly emotions such as hatred and rage winds up to be of great relevance to the plot.
I honestly found it hard to read the relevant portion of Tetsuwan Atomu, simply because it's so incoherent on the level of story and lacks almost all character development and characterization that I had a hard time understanding how I was supposed to be reading it and what I was supposed to be getting out of it. But as far as manga has come since 1964, and as much as Urasawa is now able to make 2044 look much more plausible to 2011 eyes, in the end I was struck by how much Urasawa didn't have to change. Deposed leaders of Middle Eastern countries that have been forcibly converted to democracy? That doesn't sound familiar at all, and it was just as relevant fifty years ago as it is today.
All of which is me bringing myself to address the fact that when I give you that description you may well think Egypt or Tunisia or Libya, but Urasawa was thinking Iraq, and the thinness with which he veils his critique of American imperialism in that country is, for me at least, like perpetually missing a stair. Darius XIV, the deposed dictator of Persia, even looks like Saddam Hussein, and the attitude of the not!United States, its arrogant military personnel and its smarmy President, is basically clipped straight from the headlines. The final volume of the manga even centers around the possible eruption of the not!Yellowstone volcano.
So there's that, and one wonders if that's why there was no anime adaptation of this story, unless Tezuka Productions somehow raised an objection. The other thing that Urasawa doesn't change is the gender balance. Though he does give Atom's sister Uran an expanded role, it's entirely based on her extraordinarily high degree of empathetic intuition, and no adult female character, human or robot, plays any sort of central role; they're mostly wives, mothers, and servants. I did spend a good while thinking that the pacifist Australian robot Epsilon was female, but that was entirely my own gender stereotypes tripping me up. Silly Electra, only boys and men can have adventures!
That said, Urasawa is a modern master of the medium, and I have to recommend this series extraordinarily highly, just like all his others.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.