Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Pluto is an ambitious, multi-part series with a large cast, much like Naoki Urasawa’s other epic sagas 20th Century Boys and Monster, which explore science-fiction premises through character studies that place people in extreme situations and examine the results.
This particular adventure has a very high-concept origin, being derived from an original work by Osamu Tezuka, commonly referred to as the God of Manga. His best-known character, Tetsuwan Atom or Astro Boy, is a super-powered robot who can fly and perform amazing feats of strength. In a particularly intense adventure called The Greatest Robot on Earth, Astro faces a highly advanced giant robot programmed to eliminate all his competition until he is the only powerful artificial being left on the planet. Urasawa and co-writer Takashi Nagasaki take this famous storyline and deconstruct it, keeping the essence of the plot with seven superhero robots around the world being targeted and destroyed by an implacable foe, and adding a layered, complex web of philosophical and moral problems to his greatly extended reworking. Urasawa’s immense skill in designing distinctive and individual characters in superbly detailed environments makes the whole package completely involving. It’s great to look at as well as intriguing to read. Pluto begins with a clever idea and becomes an incredibly moving story that will captivate you with its brilliantly depicted action and break your heart with its questions about what it means to be human.
On a future Earth that looks much like ours, technology has advanced to the point where fully autonomous robots are a standard feature of daily life. Some are basic models that just perform simple, repetitive manual tasks, others are so sophisticated as to be both visually and intellectually indistinguishable from humans. The sometimes uneasy relationship between people and robots can spiral into riots and other difficulties, and these flare-ups are monitored wherever they happen, around the world. One night in the mountains of Switzerland, the beloved national hero robot Mont Blanc is destroyed in a strikingly violent way. Barely a day later, a man is murdered in Germany. These murders share the common feature of the victims’ heads being anointed with makeshift horns.
Almost all the characters in Pluto retain their names and basic positions in the structure of this reimagining, but the police detective called ‘Gerhard’ in Tezuka’s original is here renamed ‘Gesicht’. This German word means face, and that will become significant as he, rather than Astro Boy, is the key protagonist, investigating, theorising and analysing the evidence to link the murders together. He deduces the cases are related, and further determines that a human can’t be responsible for these gruesomely disturbing deaths; a development with terrifying implications in a world where robots are everywhere.
Gesicht is an interesting protagonist with some unique features of his own life that make him wonder about the possibility of a very big conspiracy, and coincidentally perhaps the best person to find out if such a thing exists. His theories eventually lead him to Japan, where Vol. 2 will continue as he encounters the robot child hero: Atom.
