Review - Pluto Volume 1

I really hope Viz decides to license Billy Bat. I've become a huge fan of Naoki Urasawa. His storytelling has such a grand, cinematic approach that just makes it impossible for me to put it down. In fact, I really want to get to the next volume of Pluto, but I've got to write this review!

STORY

Pluto is a retelling of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, specifically an arc in the Astro Boy series called The Greatest Robot on Earth. It's a legendary work with anime and manga still being inspired by it today.

I've never read it.

Hopefully nobody burns me at the stake for saying that, but I never have. Therefore, I'm going into Pluto completely blank. How will it work? So far, pretty well. Naoki Urasawa seems to know that not everybody has read Astro Boy, and so he presents this story in a very familiar way. Key scenes unfold in very similar progression to Monster and 20th Century Boys. That isn't a bad thing at all, because Urasawa is a master storyteller, effortlessly weaving together several storylines.

Pluto is set in the obvious future where an unknown presence is going around destroying many of the world's most powerful and respected robots for unknown reasons. On the case is Detective Gesight, a robot in danger himself. In this future, robots coexist with humans peacefully and have thoughts and feelings of their own. It's pretty neat to see it like this, since in most sci-fi stories the robots are usually lesser than humans and are frequently discriminated against. Not so here, which is new and nice.

ART & PRESENTATION

Urasawa's style of art always hits all the right notes with me. It's realistic without losing it's cartooney charm. A lot of Urasawa manga involves a lot of talking heads because the series' themselves just don't have much action, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. 20th Century Boys had a little action, but it looks like I'll be able to see how capable Urasawa is of it here. Some of the best bits are below.

Viz's presentation is marvelous, as usual, with fine printing, a great translation, and many color pages rounding off the deal. All the spines line up well, with one slight anomaly I'll address in the review for volume 2.

CHARACTERS

Urasawa always writes great characters, even if most of them here are robots. The robots in Pluto all feel very human, and watching them go through their various trials and tribulations is great. There's only one character here that leaves an impression as a returning character, and I'll go over him here.

Our hero detective Gesicht is also a robot. He's a well made robot, though. One can barely tell that he isn't human. Being a detective and a robot makes him usually all serious all the time, but he has emotions which are shown sometimes. He also has a wife and frequently has a reoccurring nightmare, one which we don't know the details of yet.

FINAL VERDICT

I have yet to read something by Naoki Urasawa that I don't actually like, and Pluto doesn't seem to be any exception. Plus/minus below!

+ Cool sci-fi
+ Good mystery setup
+ Great art
+ Gesicht is a good lead character

A - BUY IT

Pluto has a great opening volume, and it looks to only get better from here. Next stop, Billy Bat...? Please?

(I don't own Pluto. All rights go to the author, Naoki Urasawa, and the licensing company, Viz Media).