Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Atom: The Beginning 10 opens with our cast still in Ho Chi Minh city. Young genius inventors Hiroshi Ochanomizu and Umataro Tenma are eating a casual lunch at Dr Tam’s riverside clinic, but they would not be so relaxed if they knew what was happening to Grandpa Cha and their robot Six. Grandpa Ochanomizu has never gotten over his experience with the original Mighty Atom who travelled back in time and helped him create his revolutionary N-Eva series of robots. So much so that he can’t stop thinking Atom has not returned to the future. A conversation with someone who saw Atom in action after he left Ochanomizu has him convinced the boy robot is hidden somewhere in Vietnam.

The end of The Beginning 09 saw Grandpa Cha’s curiosity leading him to follow Six who had “received a distress signal from a highly sophisticated A.I.” inside a giant abandoned dome, sealed off from outside intrusion (but not when you can scale five-metre fences like Six can) where the two encountered hundreds of security robots. And although they are drones, they are organised; controlled by a deadly robot called 100-0 (Hecaton-Maiden), swinging a sword powerful enough to slice Six into pieces.   

Anyone following this prequel to Astro Boy from the first book will be wondering how Masami Yuuki and Tetsuro Kasahara are going to reconcile the great number of revisions, additions and complications they have added to the story of the heroic little boy robot with Tezuka’s original concept. Additionally, it appears there is still a very long way to go before we get close to seeing Atom emerge from all the prototypes evolving in this series. The answer comes midway through this episode, as Grandpa Cha and Six find the source of the distress signal and uncover a big secret that has also drawn the interest of another robot inventor, Count Aaron Bremner. It’s a logic bomb resetting everything we have been expecting, to move Atom: The Beginning in a newly complex direction. It’s amusingly clever plotting and the possibilities for where the story moves next have suddenly expanded in an exciting way. You will want to see where this all goes, in The Beginning 11.