Books like PLUTO: Urasawa x Tezuka, Volume 008

Series review. Spoiler free! (For Pluto anyway, original Astro Boy spoilers allowed, you've had 50+ years, the spoiler statute of limitations has expired.)As far as I'm concerned, this is Urasawa and Nagasaki's masterpiece. It's a reimagining of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" (地上最大のロボット) a story arc from the 1952-1968 manga Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム [Tetsuwan Atom in Japanese]) by legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka, formally known as a "god of manga". Urusawa and Nagasaki's version takes place in the aftermath of an obvious parallel of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It's a mystery, and a war story, and absolutely magnificent.I'm not sure how this might read to someone unfamiliar with Astro Boy. Personally, I can only ever see this story through Astro Boy colored glasses, which I assume is expected. Atom is one of the two children's characters to be more significant to me as an adult than they were as children. (The other being Winnie-the-Pooh.) So if you'll indulge me I'm going to talk a bit about Astro Boy before moving on to Pluto.I have no memory of watching Astro Boy as a child. I'm honestly not sure if I ever saw any or not. By the late 80s, early 90s when the whole "anime" thing started to be a thing in the US, the character was familiar, with his cute but sort of creepy child robot body, but I think the stories were considered too dated and childish to be popular with American anime fans, and Tezuka's art style was not particularly appealing to me. But it has always been considered a classic, and I was living in Japan in 2003 when a TV reboot started airing, and the show simply floored me.Astro Boy is very clearly aimed at children. This fact is obvious not only in its characters, but in the sincere, surreal goodness it espouses. It's comically wholesome. The sort of world where enemies almost invariably become the best of friends once defeated. The sort of naive worldview that I, quite honestly, sneer at. But I wasn't sneering.I don't know if the series managed to thread some invisibly tiny needle, or deployed some classified superweapon, like Inspector Gesicht's Zeronium shells to pierce my cynical armor, but somehow it got through, and I adored it.But while the tone of the series is predominantly one of childishly sincere, pure optimism, it's not entirely free of darkness. There are glimpses of loss, and grief. [Slight Astro Boy spoiler] Atom's original creator Dr. Tenma, is perhaps the character who most represents the darker view in the series. Atom was originally created by a deeply grieving Dr. Tenma to replace his biological son Tobio, who died in a car crash. Atom himself was abandoned when Tenma realized Atom could never take Tobio's place.In Volume 4 of Pluto a visitor to Dr. Ochanomizu mentions the word seizensetsu, the idea that mankind is inherently good. I had never heard the Japanese term before, but it fits the 2003 series to a T. I don't have enough familiarity with Tezuka's original versions to hazard a guess as to whether or not he had that concept in mind when writing Tetsuwan Atom. Urasawa and Nagasaki, however, definitely seem to be toying with the inverse of the concept.Pluto doesn't focus overly much on Atom. It's an ensemble cast, and at least early on it is played more like a police procedural, with Inspector Gesicht of Europol acting as our main character, though POV moves around. Gesicht is one of the seven "super robots", one of the five instrumental in defeating the Kingdom of Persia during the war, and incidentally, considered a potential weapon of mass destruction himself. As various connections are made, it soon becomes clear that someone is targeting both the seven super robots and the members of the "Bora Survey Group", a team of robot scientists who were sent in before the war to investigate rumors that that Kingdom of Persia was building an robot army.As might be expected for a war story, there is grief to go around. I won't say any more about the plot, but it's awesome. Don't let the fact that it's a manga series dissuade you, few novels even dream of being this good.This gets my highest recommendation.