Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Atom: The Beginning is an all-new manga series using elements from Osamu Tezuka’s classic adventure hero Tetsuwan Atom (Mighty Atom) aka Astro Boy, and freely adapting or adding others to create a prequel to the first appearance of the heroic little robot Atom. In this new series, Hiroshi Ochanomizu and his partner Umataro Tenma are two young robotic engineering research students, postgrads at the Department of Cybernetics in Nerima, Japan.

Hiroshi’s teenage sister Ran belongs to her high school’s robot club and hangs around their rickety Lab 7 trying to get involved in the research. Moriya Tsutsumi, the snooty lead researcher of top-rated Lab 1 also has a sister, Motoko, a second-year student in the robotics department who finds Hiroshi interesting despite her brother’s contempt for the ‘riff-raff’. And there’s Shunsaku Ban, eager to learn more about robots despite his dad’s mistrust of them.

Ochanomizu and Tenma are testing their innovative ‘Bewusstsein’ A.I. in their prototype autonomous robot A106, called ‘Six’ for short. To raise money to continue their research, Six has been entered into a violently destructive robot fighting tournament where it has managed to survive all assaults by cleverly de-powering its opponents, but the final adversary Mars is much more sophisticated than the others. Mars belongs to the rich and mysterious Dr Lolo, has a shell made of a super-expensive zeronium alloy and nothing can withstand a ‘Knife Hand Strike’ from the super oscillating cutter in its fingertips — “Mars’ killer technique!!” But why would anyone spend that much money on a robot unless…?

This second book deepens the drama as Six has to be rebuilt and neither of his makers are aware their experiment is more successful than they know, as their robot has begun to think for himself. A new inventor enters the fray with another sophisticated robot named ‘North’ and, determined to find out more about Mars and Dr Lolo, the team takes some big risks. There’s more intrigue to come in 03.