This contains three chapters of one of my favorite stories in manga overall, the story of North No. 2.
This is my favorite Urasawa. Naoki Urasawa is famous for his mystery and thriller stories, but what I remember or remains of them is the humane side of them. Here he showed a lot in a story that is about robots.
The series started while the Iraq War was going on, so the invasion and the robots of mass destruction are too familiar for the readers.

While writing this review, I was at Pluto's wiki page and noticed that they finally made a TV series for it.

This is good, but I feel like a dummy because I saw Tezuka's name and thought this was some work of his I'd never heard of :) I was never really into Astro Boy, but this is a good take on it. There's alot of potential with this series.

A couple of years ago I met someone whose favourite Urasawa work was Pluto. I had only read 20th Century Boys and Monster, and I loved it. But I didn’t know the span of Urasawa’s genius until I read Pluto. Pluto was loosely adapted from Astro Boy, a character beloved by many probably even when I wasn’t even born. This is kind of the grown-up, adult, morally challenging version of Astro Boy. The main character itself isn’t Astro Boy (Atom) in this book, but he played a great part in it. Pluto asks the question, “Can robots feel?” and took very in depth delve on the question. We see various versions of future robots that are maybe outside of our everyday imagination. Pluto is genius, the story revolves around robots but isn’t lacking emotions, or empathy whilst we read it. This is the kind of manga I’m looking forward to read in the future.

"Nothing good comes of hate."

Naoki Urasawa is an exceptional writer (and artist) who always manages to create deep characters despite their large numbers within a plot. In this manga, I was moved to tears. Urasawa's signature details, such as references to Tenma and the creation of a monster, were a nice detail. The plot was intriguingly scattered around numerous main characters, offering fresh perspectives. I was especially drawn to Gesicht's backstory, and Epsilon, who bears a striking resemblance to a certain nameless blonde character and has an entirely opposing life goal, was a pleasure to read about.

The story takes place in what seems to be a utopian world where robots and humans coexist and have equal rights. However, there is a problem: while robots have evolved to possess compassion and process complex emotions, humans have not. This manga delves into how the dangerous feeling of hate conveyed by humankind can poison everything to the point of destruction. Urasawa's message is powerful and will stay with you long after you read it.

*Did not really care that this was some kind of tribute to Astro Boy, because Naoki Urasawa's powerful storytelling makes it his own masterpiece for sure.

** Definitely gotta read "20th Century Boys" now.

It's hard to overstate just how good Naoki Urasawa's "Monster" is. I've not read the manga, just watched the animated adaptation a few times, but I absolutely count that show among my favorite pieces of art ever. It's such a beautiful story with dynamic characters, and its treatment of the political situation in post-soviet East Germany is tender and detailed. It's a "dark" story and the elevator pitch makes it sound like an edgy thriller, but it's such an empathetic and hopeful piece that I always walk away from it feeling uplifted and refreshed, despite the story's grisly murders, neo-nazis, child abuse, eugenics, etc.

It takes a deft hand to pull off that kind of balancing act, and since Urasawa is, as is traditional in manga, both writer and artist, the feat is even more impressive. The man wrote and drew Monster bi-monthly and simultaneously did the same WEEKLY for his other masterpiece, 20th Century Boys, and that level of protracted quality work put him in the hospital, because of course it did. He's a celebrated artist in Japan and, I feel, woefully ignored outside his home country. Pulitzer prize-winning author (and accused sex-pest) Junot Diaz called Urasawa Japan's National Treasure, and while Diaz may be a bad person, he still obviously can be trusted to recognize good storytelling when he sees it. But despite that acclaim, I barely hear his works mentioned besides from a really particular kind of anime nerd. I think some of that is due to how difficult it is to get at his stuff legitimately and some of it is how dark Monster can get, especially for the time-sink of a 70+ episode show.

So imagine my surprise when I see a volume of an Urasawa manga I'd never even heard of in our library's too-small adult graphic novel section. It's an adaptation of an old story from Astro Boy, a manga I've literally never been interested in, but it's by Naoki Urasawa and I have access to it, so I give it a shot. And it's so damn good that I'm considering obtaining the rest of it and also even reading Astro Boy.

Pluto, at least as far as volume 1 is concerned, is a noir murder mystery set in the future years after the end of a war in which nations used robots as proxy soldiers. The surviving robots have since been granted rights and carved out new lives for themselves. When robot veterans start turning up dead, the protagonist, an Android detective, begins the hunt for their killer. As a single volume of a manga, none of these setups get any closure, but just as with Monster, the story switches narrators often, presenting pieces of the story through mini-arcs that are satisfying on their own.

One such story follows a robot war veteran who now works as a butler to a blind composer trying to overcome writer's block and finally write another symphony. Over the course of the three chapters (of eight total in the volume) that make up this story, we see the characters meet, eventually build up a trust for each other, and reach an emotional crescendo. It's a testament to Urasawa's storytelling capabilities that he's able to elicit the emotional response I felt in just 3/8ths of a single volume.

After reading this volume, I googled the series and learned that serendipitously, an animated adaptation had been announced and a trailer had dropped literally a week before I read it, set to hit Netflix this fall. And it's absolutely breathtaking. I foolishly thought it an impressive enough trailer to attract some eyes to this manga that hadn't been checked out in four years, so I put it on my Staff Picks display. It's sat there since March, with that little blurb I wrote taped to it. I moved it to my AAPI display when that was up, I moved it to my Netflix display when that was up. I'd put the rest of the series on our order request list, but when faced with months of evidence as to just how little anyone wants to read it, I took them off. Now I put it up, with that same taped label, whenever I'm desperate to fill a spot on my Staff Picks display, because I know it'll never get checked off of it.

A sad little ending to a review of art by a writer I hold in higher regard than almost anyone else I've read this year, but I guess sometimes that's just how things shake out.