Astro Boy 23
November 30, 2008
Yay, last volume of Astro Boy!
I was actually pretty excited about this. The last two volumes are mostly short chapters, as opposed to the books that each have 2-3 stories in them. The last volume was pretty awesome, if I remember right. This one was less so, since it was comprised of shorts from a magazine called “Second Grader” that tied into a new Astro Boy anime from the early 80s. There’s some red flags right away. Also, the stories originally ran in color (which doesn’t look good in black and white), and the art is not quite up to Tezuka’s usual standard. I would say that was because 50s-60s Astro was a more retro style that he’d ceased to use, but the last story is Shounen Jump story from 1976, and it looks great. Maybe the cartoony style was just for “Second Grader?” Dunno.
The stories are each only around 10 pages long and are sort of simple, jokey stories. Astro’s superpowers are slightly revised, and most of the stories involve a gigantic robot wreaking havoc and Astro stopping them, then cracking wise in the last panel. Nothing is a serious threat, and nothing really gets going over the space of ten pages. It makes me appreciate the older stories a lot more.
So, I go ten years without once reading any reference to the Mannekin Pis in manga, and I read two volumes in the space of 24 hours that reference it. Momo, residing in Brussels, makes reference to letting Sumire see it in volume 13 or 14 of Tramps Like Us, and its used as inspiration for an extra superpower for Atlas in one of the earlier stories in this volume. It was actually the only story I liked, because the superpower involved Atlas peeing on his enemies from above and blowing them up. When fighting Astro Boy, Atlas threatens to pee on him, to which Astro responds “That’s not cool, Atlas.” It’s truly one of Astro Boy’s finest moments.
The only other story I wound up enjoying was one where a baby elephant’s mother was killed and Astro was trying to find it a substitute mother that could feed it. The first candidate was a gorilla with enormous breasts. The subsequent candidates were all different animals, all with enormous breasts, but mounted low on their bodies so that they kind of looked like genitals. It was really, REALLY weird.
The last story in the volume is a longer story that ran in Shounen Jump. It’s of the same type as the earlier stories… it runs about 50 pages long and has a moral at the end about humans polluting and needing to stop, blah blah blah. It’s okay, but there were far better stories than that in the series. Lamp was in it as the ambassador to Iran, which was kind of cool.
