Astro Boy 5
Posted: March 15, 2007 Filed under: Astro Boy 1 Comment »For some reason, it takes me a long time to read these. On another note: Tezuka mentions that when his stories were put into tankouban, they would give him a concrete number of pages per volume and he would need to cut or draw new pages as necessary to meet this deadline. Also, for whatever reason, sometimes the format for the original art didn’t match the trim size of the book, so he would have to cut apart the frames and make the drawings bigger. Fascinating. One wonders, if he had to expand the drawing on that page to suit the new size (in that instance, a 2-page splash illustration that took up the top 2/3 of the two page spread), he would have also have had to cut apart all the panels and rearrange them to suit the new page size. The panels are modular, so this is possible and not too many of them would need to be redrawn, but it is insane all the same, and it would throw off any page flow he had in mind.
Anyway, the first story features a surly early model transformer who managed to be pretty awesome. The clear winner this time around, though was “Space Snow Leopard,” which delivers exactly what it promises. A snow leopard. From space. With six legs. This snow leopard also melts into a puddle periodically, and can reform and do all sorts of weird things. The plot involves this leopard (named Lupe the Space Snow Leopard) and a man that comes with him sucking all the artificial energy on Earth so that it will be powerless when invasion rolls around. The solution to this problem is also a lot more transformer-like than you may imagine.
Ooh… I don’t really want to read volume six, but that will mean Astro Boy is cleared from my backlog, and also that I can get three more volumes… and be three volumes closer to Saint Seiya.
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