Astro Boy 20
Posted: June 14, 2008 Filed under: Astro Boy Leave a comment »I don’t know. I really didn’t like this volume. A little more than half of it is dedicated to the continuation from the last volume of the story about Astro Boy being evil, except it did everything interesting it was going to do last time, and now all we’re left with is some horribly out-of-character stuff… and a trip to Africa. Yeah. You can imagine how that is. Most of the story takes place in Africa.
The second story was kind of cool. On the way back from Africa, Astro and Tenma stop in the desert and rescue a boy from the 4th dimension who has the power to invoke the past for brief periods, but only if his life is in danger. They rescue him because he is literally being kept as a slave, and is periodically drowned and beaten so that his keeper can pull jewels from the past. Well, Tenma rescues him, then kidnaps him so that he can pull a fresh Astro from seven years ago and… raise him to be his son. He promises this time he’ll be good and won’t sell him to the circus. Stuff happens at the end that really, REALLY doesn’t make sense, but it’s a pretty cool story. I probably would have liked it a lot better if it hadn’t followed the other one.
