Slightly Biased Manga

This volume is lots and lots of old stories.  Some are only a few pages long.  Some are longer.  The first Astro Boy story isn’t here, but Tezuka mentions that these were mostly among the first, and it was the first appearance of a lot of characters, like Tawashi and several of Astro’s classmates.

Some of the art anomalies are more noticeable in this volume than usual.  I think these chapters ran in color originally, but it’s also highly possible that the artwork is several generations removed from the original source, but it’s very fuzzy.  It’s probably an issue of the originals being in color though, because occasionally there will be a few really sharp pages that appear randomly together, and Tezuka is sort of notorious for continuously redrawing and reworking his stories.  There’s also a chapter which has weird formatting issues where it looks like he added a piece of paper under the original and drew the edges that way, or had to crop the edges of the original panels to make them smaller, something like that.  It was something he mentioned in one of the very early volumes.  There’s also a transition page consisting of a single orphaned panel that looks really weird.

This set of stories is actually better than normal just by virtue of being really old and bizarre.  At one point, Astro is given some sort of “computer disease” that you have to smile at.  Far removed from your standard computer virus, it just corrodes Astro’s insides.  He fights some pretty awesome robot bombs, some aliens during a trip to Mars, and he even fights a Frankenstein’s monster robot alongside some sort of robot cult.  Weird things happen, like Shibugaki constantly picking on Astro, and a really bizarre scene between Shibugaki and Astro’s dad.  Kenichi appears a lot more frequently in the early stories, and he gets a chance to be a friend as well as lose heart in Astro… and Shunsaku Ban even gets to use his real name and occupation as PI.

He also has a chapter where he saves some underwater slaves stuck digging a uranium mine in a gigantic mechanical serpent.  This chapter is weird in several ways, and is probably the most bizarre Astro Boy story I’ve ever read.  At one point, he slams his head and sort of misshapes it.  He does his feats at night, causing him to do some weird stuff during the day.  A couple times, Astro uses the help of a girl living on an island.  We are mercifully spared a caricature, but it’s still sort of implied that the island’s inhabitants are cannibals.  Stranger still, Astro only saves two of the slaves.  As far as I remember, the rest are left underneath, unless he leaves it to the two who escaped to alert the authorities and free them.  But they seem more concerned with tracking down Astro Boy.

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.

Now we’re closing in on the end of the series and I finally find a story that I can be interested in. Tezuka introduces the volume by explaining that people were dissing on Astro Boy in the 60s because a student revolution was happening and apparently everyone was rallying around characters who were underdog-rebellious kind of characters. I assume this is a reference to Kamui, but Kamui must’ve been a hit RIGHT AWAY if that’s what the allusion is. Anyway, Tezuka’s editor convinced him to try and make Astro into a bad guy, and apparently what little popularity Astro Boy still had disappeared instantly. He says he never really recovered his reputation after that, which is kind of interesting.

This volume is about one and a half stories, the first one is about a robot named the Blue Knight who can inexplicably rebel against and injure humans. He rallies all robots around himself successfully when Ochanomizu is captured and someone else begins to take harsh measures against all robots in response to Blue Knight’s crimes. Astro doesn’t play the bad guy in this story… quite the contrary. He sides with the robots when the villain takes away his parents, but he’s against hurting humans the entire time. While there are simple themes raised in every other story, this one probably does the best job of any of the other ones I’ve read of calling into question the nature of the relationship between humans and robots. It was a genuinely good read, which is not something I often say of Astro Boy stories.

The second story is a direct followup to the first, which ends with Astro getting his artificial intelligence destroyed. Ochanomizu does his best to try and repair him, but only Tenma knows how to revive Astro, and Tenma won’t do it unless Ochanomizu turns ownership over to him. In a bizarrely out-of-character move, Tenma sets all his robots against all humans to take over the world, Astro among them. He seems to take it relatively well when they run out of his control. This is the one where Astro genuinely turns into a bad guy, since Tenma wipes his AI and Astro the blank slate runs wild with world domination in his head. It’s true, it’s not a very good story, and I can see why it was so unpopular. Not only is it totally out-of-place to see Astro acting that way, it’s also not a really good move for Tenma. Tenma isn’t really a “good guy,” so to speak, he’s more of a quiet loner with anger issues, the kind of guy who’s a sulky genius at work then goes home and is cruel to his family or whatever. He did sell Astro to the circus, but he’s not the kind of guy you can imagine wanting to take over the world.

Anyway, that story carries over into the next volume, I assume. As out-of-character as everything is at the moment, it’s still better than most Astro Boy stories, though.

Note to self: Hamegg plays a minor role in the first story, assistant to the bad guy or something. He’s still a great character.

I was underwhelmed by the stories in this volume of Astro Boy, I must say.  Tezuka mentioned in one of the other volumes that this series of Astro Boy volumes was published with the better stories in the early volumes in case the series got cancelled early.  That wasn’t very encouraging news for me, because I’m in the final section of stories now.  The ones in this volume just… weren’t very good.

The best one was probably the one with Atlas, which introduces the “Omega Factor,” a piece which makes robots capable of both good and evil… in other words, they do things that most robots wouldn’t normally do, like hit humans, since most robots are programmed with only good intentions.  The “Omega Factor” makes Atlas process things more like a human would, and thus makes him a more “perfect” robot.  I thought this was interesting since I’ve just read a huge chunk of “Pluto” by Naoki Urasawa, and the idea of robots doing (or being able to do) bad things as a result of thinking more like humans and why this would make their AI “perfect” is sort of central to the plot of that series.

Most of the volume is taken up by the story “Robot Spaceship,” which is about aliens who are able to raise the dead and cause a lot of problems.  It was very long and not all that interesting, though there were some notable battles, an undead character, and a tiny Astro-bot that manages to cause a lot of problems for the aliens.

There are two other very short stories at the end of the volume which lean heavily on morals.  One is about not listening to kids who tease you, and the other one is about… not stealing?  Not getting eaten by rock-munching aliens?  I don’t know.  It just wasn’t that cool.

I actually read this yesterday, and I realized it was kind of a coincidence when I got to work since it was Astro’s birthday and all. I would have posted about it last night, but my internet was down, unfortunately.

I wasn’t very into the stories in this volume. The first story was “The Frozen Human.” I did like the short explanation at the beginning that Tezuka gave. The story is set around the Aztec temples, and he mentions that when it ran, people in Japan weren’t familiar with the Aztecs and thought he had totally made them up based on the Egyptians. When they made the chapter into an episode of the anime, he said they changed the setting to Egypt, and when the same episode ran in America, it was very popular because people thought it was a lot like Lawrence of Arabia. The actual story… hm, it was okay. It seemed to jump around abruptly a lot more than a normal Astro Boy story.

The only thing I liked about “Gademu” was what the giant monster-like robot was made of. I thought that was pretty amazing.

Fuhrer ZZZ confused me. At the beginning, Tezuka mentioned that he started drawing the story with the President and the Fuhrer as the same person. He abandoned this partway through (after dropping a hint which made no sense later) because he says he thought it was a stupid idea. When I figured out what was going on, I thought that would’ve been a pretty good twist, so I was excited to see what the better idea was. It… was far from a better idea. I was in shock.

“The Face in the Rock” was okay. It was a short one, and I liked the way the trap was set up in the end.

“Space Parasites” delivers what it promises. We get all sorts of parasites, like tree parasites, giant rat parasites, human parasites, etc. It seems like the actual story would have been avoided if humans had just allowed the aliens to take over rats and stuff like they asked, it seems like there would be no harm in that. But nooooo… we just had to pick a fight, apparently. The fact they turned into humans was a good twist that wasn’t used enough, because it meant that Astro couldn’t beat up the parasites in that form.

One thing I always forget to mention is the fact the police use puppy cars. I always laugh whenever I see them, because it’s just so RANDOM, and I remember being driven crazy at first, because it’s a joke which is never alluded to by any of the characters. It’s just cool in Astro Boy’s universe for the police to drive around in puppy cars. I started reading Pluto a few days ago, and the cars were referenced. I was hoping things were going where I wanted them to when Tawashi and Nakamura started talking about the car redesign and Tawashi mentioned he wanted a fierce design that struck fear into criminals… and then I died when Ochanomizu completed the joke later.

I wasn’t nearly as thrilled with this volume as I was with the last volume.  Last time we got a bunch of historical insight into the series, other manga artists, and a lot of commentary from Tezuka.  We even got to see the primitive beginnings of Astro Boy.  This time around, there was little, if any, introduction from Tezuka, and the stories were a little bland.

The story I definitely remember Tezuka introducing was one that he said was based on media coverage of the Loch Ness monster at the time.  When he introduced it like that, I thought the story would be about the “gentle giant” Nessie stereotype I’ve seen elsewhere.  Not so.  There is a whole race of lake monsters, and they’re out to take over humans.  They control them with gas and hypnotize people into killing each other.  There’s an awesome takeover at the end.  That story was pretty rad, if a bit slow to get going.

A story called “Robio and Robiette” let me know to expect Shakespeare undertones, but this was a very close adaptation of the play, except done with robots.  The two families are done as feuding scientists with robots who are wired to beat on each other when they see an opponent.  I don’t remember a lot of the character names from the original play, but I did pick up on the “Chibolt” robot.  The ending was understated-disturbing in a very Tezuka way.

What else… there was another story about Astro Boy balloons wreaking havoc courtesy of Skunk Kusai, and the first story involved ghost cats.  Duke Red was in here somewhere too, but then again he always is.

This is it for the Astro Boy I actually have in my possession, but there’s still… 8 volumes of the series left that I’ll need to pick up at some point.  I think I’ve had Astro Boy overload for the time being, though.

This volume was much different than any of the others in the series so far, and is actually more what I pictured Astro Boy being like after reading all the annotations and stuff in volume one.  There are 3-4 stories, all of them are really old, and I think all of them have intros from Tezuka, which have been missing from a lot of the stories in recent volumes.  I like stories from the ’50s more, because it’s easier to see how far Tezuka’s come since the beginning of the series.  The stories from that era have been extremely rare up to now though, so maybe there’ll be a bunch in the last 8 volumes I have yet to read.

The intros from Tezuka are all really interesting this time around, too.  The first one talks about some of the people submitting manga to the magazine Astro was running in.  These stories start out just like boring stories artists write about their assistants in other manga, except then Tezuka will mention the pen name the person wound up writing under, and you’re like, “ooh, it was LEIJI Matsumoto that won that contest.”  There actually is a really long story about one of his assistants in this volume.  I was losing patience with it until he revealed at the end the assistant had drawn many of the pages in the next story, and the assistant was actually Shotaro Ishinomori.  He also mentioned that Shotaro Ishinomori looked like a potato, which I thought was interesting.

Also included in this volume was one episode of the “Ambassador Atom” story that Tezuka had been running when he came up with Astro Boy, and the actual story called “Ambassador Atom” which reads like a transition from the former series to Astro Boy.  Or, at least, that’s how I understand the progression, I wasn’t too clear on the titles et al and how the transition took place, though the first, shorter story leads into the longer story, and that seems to lead into Astro Boy pretty nicely.  The older sample is only a few pages long, and is pretty primitive.  The first story that actually had Astro Boy in it goes through Astro’s complete history (though the circus ringmaster isn’t Hamegg in this version, sadly), then proceeds to kill off Tenma and Space Tenma.  It’s a lot more coherent and less primitive than you’d expect, though still has weird idiosyncrasies that you’d expect from early Tezuka stories.

And in case you were missing Hamegg, he appears as a bad guy in one of the other stories.  So does Skunk.  Kenichi shows up pretty prominently too, and I think I remember a brief flash of Lamp, but I could be wrong.

This volume was crammed full of shorter stories, and there wasn’t really one that dominated the volume.  The first story was about an alien robot that was commissioned by an explorer from the Ministry of Science.  Astro swears up and down that the miniature version of the robot told him through psychic abilities that he would destroy all humans, but nobody believes Astro.  Well, until the other aliens show up in the poor village where the robot’s head was being used as the sole light source.  You know how these stories roll.  In the most insane way possible.

The next story, called “Uran,” begins with Astro showing shiny new versions of Cobalt and Uran around town and trying to get them acclimated to the human way of life.  In case you didn’t think Osamu Tezuka had invented enough, here he shows he also invented battle bots, since this story is mostly about robots fighting coliseum-style in an arena and destroying each other (or turning each other into smoking pipes, as the case may be).  You may think it’s Astro who takes part in the festivities, but you’d be wrong.  Uran is the champ here.

The next story is about a swarm of killer bees being unleashed on humanity from below the Gobi desert.  You can imagine how that goes.  Another story features a race of alien centaurs that love children and teach them how to obtain special powers.

There’s one story at the end that’s only about eight pages long, and I think it was mostly intended as a gag story. It features genetically enhanced snails that are sucking people of their moisture and turning them into mummies.  The last panel is a great gag if you don’t see it coming.

Most of this volume was taken up by a really long story about a robot named Zolomon who wasn’t really a robot (and wasn’t really a golem either, come to think of it), a tiny alien planet, a lucky jewel, a boy who wanted to be changed into a cyborg, a disembodied queen head with psychic powers, and a whole bunch of other insane things that came together to form a really long, epic Astro Boy story.  At one point, Ochanomizu is shot and killed.  Who are the only two characters in Tezuka’s staff evil enough to start the riot and do the actual shooting?  Why, Hamegg and Lamp, of course.  It took me a minute to recognize Lamp, but Hamegg actually has a bit part in this story.  And it’s hard not to recognize Hamegg.  While Lamp can be made to look like a regular person, Hamegg just can’t be disguised.

There were two other short stories which were also awesome.  One was about Astro getting emotions like a human (basically a human heart) so he could appreciate things like art and music.  This backfires when it also makes him a scaredy cat unable to fight evil. This was apparently drawn by someone else, though Tezuka went back and redrew most of the pages for the graphic novel.

The last story is about a little robot boy who lies, which robots don’t do.  He says exactly the opposite of the truth every time, and he causes several panics when he is released into the public.  His real purpose is to serve a dying old lady, and he was made to lie so that he would make her feel better when she asked how she looked today.  Aww.

Still slowly getting through Astro Boy.  I went back to it because I started playing through Astro Boy: Omega Factor on GBA.  A fine game.

Most of this volume concerns the roboids.  There are several robots who fight along with Astro to stop these robots from outer space (technically the Earth’s core, but originally outer space, apparently).  I always hate it when an honest robot’s weakness is exploited and they get killed.  It happens once with a robot who loves to play with children here.  Another robot is blown up while trying to use a suicide power.  I kinda didn’t believe that one, because I thought the superpower was going to come back around and knock the roboid out, but… it didn’t.  He just transformed into a harpoon or something and was knocked off course.

There was a little boy roboid that tried to make friends with Astro, but unfortunately his dad was the head roboid, so he and Astro were locked in a battle for grim death.

There was a minor role for Uran in this story.  Uran doesn’t often make an appearance in this series, and here she’s kind of knocked out right at the beginning and someone impersonates her the rest of the time, but we do see a lot of Uran in this chapter.

There are three other stories in this volume, all are relatively short.  The best one was “Broadcasts from Outer Space,” which featured Uran, Cobalt, and Astro dancing up a storm in the most adorable way possible.  Basically, alien television signals are being broadcast and robots are picking up the shows and acting them out inadvertently, which tends to make them go berserk.  An alien tries to collect fees for the signals with unexpected results.

“Eyes of Christ” is an almost straightforward mystery.  I kind of liked it.  Duke Red gets one of the only good guy roles I’ve ever seen him in.

“Youth Gas” was just awesome.  An asteroid lands on Earth and generates a gas which makes anything exposed to it younger.  They use it on a celebrity or two before the asteroid is stolen.  At one point, Cobalt and Astro must fight to the robo-death, which was extremely unexpected.  Much like Uran, Cobalt is also unfairly overlooked in this series.