Urasawa’s Pluto

I haven’t made a proper top 10 list, but – were I to do so – the project would be greatly simplified by the consideration that Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto [amazon] series – eight volumes – would leave me with only a few slots still to fill. This is translated manga, credited as Urasawa x Tezuka, because Urasawa is re-telling/re-envisioning a classic Astro Boy story arc, “The Greatest Robot On Earth”, from the 50’s. The original was typically silly and fun, yet earnest, in that early Tezuka way. You can get a nice reprint of that here [amazon] – but read the Urasawa first, because it is retold as a mystery, and reading the original will actually give away the surprising overall arc too soon.

The original version is a series of robot fights – some bad humans are making trouble for the robots, forcing them into this – and there is a great deal of goofy botheration about who has more ‘horse-power’. What Urasawa works wonders with are the original characters. Mont Blanc, the nature-attuned, Swiss mountaineering poet-robot. Epsilon, the effeminate, male, mothering, superstrong, solar-powered, pacifist Australian robot. North No. 2, the post-traumatically stressed, six-armed, piano lessons-wanting Scottish butler robot. Gesicht, the troubled, German Europol detective robot. Brando, the down-to-earth, life-loving Turkish family man/ fighter robot. Heracles, the Greek, honor-loving fighter robot. And Atom and Uran (Astro Boy and sister). And Pluto (I’ll let that one be a surprise). And the old Astro Boy cast. And – these weren’t in the original – ‘Dr. Roosevelt’, and his sinister Teddy avatar. And that other one, the Hannibal Lecterish robot stuck in his cell, behind all the barricades, impaled on that pole. It’s fantastically clever the way it is reworked, while keeping the basic plot and characters surprisingly true to the original – fun, thrilling, with wonderful moments of Ursprunglichkeit springing up amidst bells and whistles and evil humans and zeronium alloy.

One clever trope that Urasawa introduces, which I think is genuinely an original one – not just with respect to the Tezuka original but with respect to the whole genre of robot fiction – is that in this world there are celebrity robots, like Mont Blanc. The humans revere them. And yet the humans continue to treat the mass of ordinary robots as disposable non-persons, despite the fact that it’s not so clear what would separate your old-model cleaning lady robot from noble Mont Blanc. Is it just that the cleaning lady doesn’t write poetry? I think this is good allegory of typical ethnic conflict patterns. The dominant group somewhat assuages its guilt/uncertainty, by raising just a few members of the minority above even the level of the majority, imbuing them with extra authenticity and heroism, and somehow in this way actually cementing the old majority/minority relations in place, rather than challenging them.

There’s just so much to love in these eight volumes. In a way it’s very much of a piece with a lot of great American comics, made over the past quarter century, which are, in effect, imaginative re-workings of more ‘naive’, earlier comics and comics genres. A lot of this has just been affectionate parody and fanboy navel-gazing nostalgia, true, but I think most of the best American comics in the last generation fit the pattern. I’m not an expert on manga, but I think Japanese comics have not tended to go this particular way. Ingeniously inserting ‘the complex into the simple’ (to borrow Empson’s formula for pastoral, which I think covers most quality American comics of the past quarter century.) Not that there’s no other good way to do it. But Pluto really stands to Astro Boy the way that Watchmen stands to superhero comics. It’s the real deal, a real classic.