Slightly Biased Manga

Eh, what the heck.  I’ll write this one tonight since I just finished it.

I still have a hard time getting through Astro Boy stories because of the density of what’s going on.  The volumes are small, there’s a lot of panels on a page, and the stories can go all over the place before they’re done.  It takes me one train ride to read about 40 pages of Astro Boy where I would read 160 pages of anything else.

A lot of the stories in this volume had really, REALLY random elements.  The first story, which was about a robot bomb-boy built by aliens and trying to hide from bad guys on Earth, had a choice random moment which I felt could be used as an icon of 60 children’s entertainment.  After the action had been largely Astro beating up alien bad guys, Astro found a remote house with an old woman living with her granddaughter.  Astro suspected the daughter of being the bomb, but he let it go and the scene was relatively quiet and nice.  Then, out of nowhere, they were attacked by giant ants.  That’s right: giant alien ants.  Didn’t know that aliens could do that?  Neither did I.  The ants snatch the granddaughter and fly off into space to a flying saucer.  In order to catch them in the act, Astro tears one of the ants apart and hides inside it, then flies up into space with the giant ant swarm.

Another story opens with Higeoyaji riding an airplane and talking about how much he liked it.  On the next page, the airplane is struck by a passing jet and split open, and all the passengers are parachuting out of it.  On the next page, we find out that Higeoyaji has somehow wound up by himself in the middle of a desert, and passes out from the heat.  Then a masked man pops out of the ground in a tank and offers him a ride to Japan.   This is all within the first 4 pages of the story.  Later, the man’s mask is taken off, and we’re treated randomly to a horribly offensive racial caricature the likes of which we’re warned about in the beginning of every Astro Boy volume.  Oddly, what appears to be a straighter version of an Asian caricature appears on the next page.  I don’t know.

There’s a really short story at the end of the volume where the action is abrupt and in continual affirmation of whatever the characters have just said.  The effect is strange.

So yes, this was one of the most bizarre, random volumes of Astro Boy I’ve read yet.  The storytelling here sort of reads like a more refined version of the bizarre tangents that would happen in Lost World, but a precursor to the insane plots we’d get in Ode to Kirihito and MW later.

Thank you, Osamu Tezuka.

I’m still not quite as enamored with this series as I was when I was reading the “Origins of Astro” story a few volumes ago, but there’s some decent stories in this volume, and you have to appreciate the insanity of these stories, because it’s like reading a small-scale version of a Tezuka epic every time.

The first story is about a planet-shaping robot made by aliens being sent to Earth by mistake.  Garon is the robot’s name.  I actually kind of liked this story, if only because Garon literally had no weakness whatsoever, and Astro couldn’t beat him in a fight.  Duke Red was in this story.

There was another good story about 5 psychic French kids who are intercepted by aliens who are set on destroying the planet, since it was that alien who made mankind millions of years ago.  Yeah, it was something like that, and it was totally serious.  Sorry for the light spoiler, but I think it’s important that you know the alien was slurped up by cows in the end.

The best story, and the most disturbing, was one which involved giving Astro a body which had been aged 10 years.  The same superpowers and everything were in this body, it was just older-looking.  The villain was an international conman that wanted Astro’s original body.  Co-starred Mr. James “Dnob” and the conman’s name was word play-ish as well.

9? Are we on volume 9 already? I ordered five more during the recent Right Stuf Dark Horse sale, but I don’t know if I’ll get them or not. What are the odds this series is still in print after five years? While I’d like to believe it is because of its historical significance… yeah. I don’t know.

While I still fall asleep a lot while reading these, I think they’re starting to get a bit more exciting random story-wise. This one has a pretty epic battle with a robot Cleopatra that involves Dr. Tenma and his rival as well as some random gigantic Egyptian robots.

The other two stories are better, though. The second story, which is quite long, deals with a teleporter fubar which causes a static ghost to appear and attack people. This was caused by a jealous scientist who regrets his decision now. The static monster is actually a combination person, rabbit, robot, and fish, and it shifts form, so it actually winds up being really cool. Astro can’t do much to attack the ghost, so they have to use other means. It’s got a surprisingly surreal ending.

The last story is kinda short, but introduces Cobalt, who I believe winds up being Astro’s brother. Cobalt looks just like Astro, and is Dr. Ochanomizu’s attempt to replicate Astro after Astro went AWOL. Apparently he’s just not as good as Dr. Tenma, and Cobalt is kind of a second place finisher. Interestingly, Tezuka says Cobalt died in the original version of this story, which is… really bizarre and violent.

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I actually had a big anniversary post up last night that involved artbooks and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, among other things, but I took it down because it felt wrong.  It also felt wrong taking it down, because it took almost 4 hours to prepare.  At any rate, this site turned 3 on Saturday, and I had a week-long celebration planned, but that’s been postponed indefinitely.

Have some Astro Boy, though!  My comic store still carries this, so I keep buying it from them.  I was pretty excited about this volume, because it has the end of the origins of Astro story that’s been running since volume 6.  We see an epic escape from Hamegg and a really cute story where some mystery person makes Astro a robot family.  Aww.

Unfortunately, the actual conclusion to the story was kind of boring.  The conclusion wraps up everything with Scara and her husband, and there is plenty of action, alien stuff, and Astro even gets taken down at one point… but it just seemed kind of boring compared to the rest of the story.  Maybe it was because it had been too long since I read the other parts though, I don’t know.

The last story in the volume was pretty awesome.  It was a simple story about a robot who gets his head stolen, then goes around ripping the heads off other robots to see if they fit him.  He’s got a torso with eyes on it, which is pretty creepy.  Apparently, while his body is strong enough to take out pretty much every one of the huge robots he comes across, his head makes for the strongest robot on the planet, and is used for evil purposes.  So… he was the strongest robot ever when he had his head?  How long was he like this?  When did he cease to be a labor robot on the moon?  HUH?  There are… many things which I had a hard time grasping.  The last line of the story seems like the most important: “Why would humans make a robot like that?”

Interestingly, a lot of the last story takes place in Los Angeles, and even when it moves to Japan, LA is mentioned repeatedly.  That’s a little California Love, straight from Tezuka himself.  Or the translator/editor, in case they were just trying to make us feel better.

One final note, the adaptation on this series is fantastic.  As bored as I get reading it sometimes (I fell asleep three times reading this volume), the puns and stuff are exquisite and very much in the silly spirit of the series.  I can’t remember any specifically right now, but there was a particularly good one at the beginning of the volume that made me want to give the responsible person a high five.

Yay! I got the next volume from the comic shop. Unfortunately, they didn’t have volume 8, but I didn’t think much about it until I finished this volume and found out the story is in three parts.

It’s still really, really good here. I like this huge story much better than the shorter, smaller ones, though abrupt deaths still bother me a bit. This volume deals with Astro being found in his predicament from last time 20-some years later (in a rather improbable way, though… WHY IS THE NOTE STILL INTACT?), and when he gets sent back to Japan, he gets 24 hours to do the right thing. He meets up with the kid from last time’s daughter, and they go on an adventure to try and get robots their rights. The story ends kind of sadly though, and had the volume ended on the cliffhanger here, where Astro Boy just lays down and dies in resignation, I probably would’ve been pulling my hair out.

The second half of the volume is a rather well-told origin story for Astro Boy. I can’t remember if Tezuka told us in volume one or if we learned in editor’s notes, but we got the nuts and bolts of it back then with an explanation that somehow Japanese people just always knew, and there wasn’t much of an origin story for Astro. This baffled me initially, but then I realized that he got more of an origin story than, say, Bugs Bunny, so I guess you don’t really need one.

This story is SAD. Dr. Tenma’s son Tobio dies, and Dr. Tenma goes against everyone to try and make the best robot in the world in the image of his son, sort of to replace him. Astro is called Tobio for most of the volume, and watching Tobio and Dr. Tenma is quite sad… Dr. Tenma loves this son very much, he’s gotta teach him how to be human, Tobio loves Dr. Tenma, and you know eventually Dr. Tenma sells Tobio to the circus for whatever reason. It is very, VERY sad.

The circus scenes at the end are heartbreaking, too. Hamegg makes for a good villain, as he beats and forces Astro to do a ton of horrible things he doesn’t want to do. We get a cliffhanger, but since he’s just locked in Hamegg’s closet with no power, you sort of know the potential to free him is there. Hamegg gets a pie in the face from Ochanomizu at the end too, which is also kind of awesome.

Yes. I love this story arc. Screw the strongest robot in the world, give me Once Upon a Time.

AAH!  Astro Boy heard me complain!  I loved this volume, which is apparently a compilation of Astro Boy’s run in the newspapers post-anime.  All the chapters form a cohesive story which leaves off at a sad cliffhanger at the end of the book.

The story is about an infuriating locust woman coming to Earth because she felt like it, sent here by her husband in an attempt to get her off the planet when she’d taken a lover and the lover decided to kill the husband as the laws of their planet state.  Seriously.  After awhile, we get to the part where Astro gets involved.  When her ship crashes and burns, it sends her and Astro back to 1967, 50 years in the past.

The locust woman is ANNOYING.  She just wants to hang out in nature all day and doesn’t want to be a productive member of society, doesn’t see why she should have to, and constantly annoys every single character that crosses her path.  She was just a bizarre character, and Astro stuck by her always… until she called him a slave and he ran off crying.  But even then, he came back for her.

Astro was a lot different here, too.  Most of the characters associated with him are not here (Mustachio and Dr. Ochanomizu are replaced in the past by other characters… sorta…), so it’s just Astro.  He is extremely upset about being in the past where noone knows about robots, noone can relate to him, and where he can’t get energy once he runs out.  It’s really sad.

That was why I liked it, I think.  It was so sad, and you just felt so bad for Astro throughout, and it did not have a happy end for the cliffhanger.  So yes, I want to read what happens next.

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.

Astro Boy… I don’t know.  It’s not for me.  When I read it, I feel like I’m reading a textbook or eating vegetables.  It’s sort of against my will, but I know it’s good for me in the end.  Plus, I’m a completist, and since I’ve started it I have to finish it, and the incentive for finishing is starting Saint Seiya.  I really wanna read that one, and I’ve got… 19 more volumes of this to go!

This one had a lot more shorter stories than any of the first three volumes.  My favorite of these short stories was the one that took place on the moon (”Ivan the Fool”), because I really enjoyed how Tezuka played with ecology there and I liked the way the whole stranded scenario played out.  That one felt like it probably would have been at home in any anthology, and it was a lot less kiddy to me than the others.

The best story in the volume was actually one called “Ghost Manufacturing Machine.”  It was just as huge and epic as the Strongest Robot story from last volume.  It’s got peril in the fact that the scientist is kidnapped and taken to another country, and Astro can’t go after him because it breaks robot law, it’s got a lot of Astro getting into tight situations, it’s got Hitlini, it’s got a backstabbing friend for the scientist who turns out to be all right, and it’s got a cute robot named Platinum.  What more could a six-year-old boy ask for?  While the series isn’t for me, I feel like it’s one of the few manga that would do well to be in every library in America simply because it is really, REALLY good for kids.

Once again though, the series deals with death in rather disturbing ways.  Two characters are killed at the end of the main story, and barely any pause is given to either.  You kind of feel the impact of one because he’s sacrificing himself willingly, but the other… literally it comes out of nowhere, about two panels are spent on the scene, and I don’t think he’s mentioned again despite the huge part he’s played.  I felt pretty bad about the second death.

Ugh, I am sick. You’d think that this would lead to more time to read manga (I got sent home early from work, which is something), but I’ve just been sleeping and trying to get the feeling back in my skin. Ugh.

I did read Astro Boy, though. I was unable to find this volume in the comic shops around me, so I had to order it from Amazon. Imagine my surprise when I found out that most of the volume contains the “Greatest Robot on Earth” arc, the one I’d been wanting to read so I could jump into Pluto if/when it gets licensed. I couldn’t quite remember the name, but I knew I’d hit the mark when the story started “Ah, Pluto…”

This story was really good and REALLY SAD. I think Astro Boy is perfect for little boys, as I have mentioned before, but it doesn’t really make for very deep stories.  This one kinda suffers from being a little kids manga, because there’s a ton of stuff that could’ve been explored.  Most of the seven robots, with the exception of Epsilon and Astro, didn’t get very much screentime, and when Epsilon was given screentime, it was very, very good  and made me want sad backstories for the rest of the robots.  It broke my heart what happened to both Epsilon and Pluto, but mostly Epsilon, because of the orphans, because of his modesty, and because he got a chance to pull off some heroic feats before the end.

Tezuka mentioned at the very beginning that he just couldn’t bring himself to make Pluto evil, and I think that added a lot to the story too.  He could’ve easily made that robot as faceless as… the one that appeared at the end whose name I don’t even remember, but Pluto did have a sense of justice and fair play, and it seemed like he did feel bad for what he did.

With as much raw material as this to work with, Pluto by Urasawa must be mind-blowing amazing.  I’m ready to jump in now, hooray!  Now all it needs is an American publisher.

The extremely short “Mad Machine” story in the back doesn’t have an intro from Tezuka like the others have, and I think the most I got out of that story was the backwards clock the characters were looking at at one point. I can understand not wanting to alter the art, but COME ON.

I actually liked the second volume a lot better than the first. While the Deadcross story wasn’t my favorite thing in the world, I really liked the Kino the magician and White Planet arcs.

There are still a few things which are mildly disturbing about the series, though. Last volume it was the closet full of dog pelts. This volume it was the fact that Tezuka dedicated an introduction to talking about how people thought it was too violent for Astro to be falling on the ground and breaking, but not a thing was said when a little boy was slapping his younger sister around in the last story. There wasn’t even any repercussions for it… the little girl actually sacrifices herself in the end, and nothing is said about the beating. What the hell, I guess it was the sixties.

I liked the robot magic stuff, though. It’s kind of weird that the human magician was better than the robot magician, who used science. Another disturbing thing was that noone made a fuss about the robot being dramatically shot and killed at the end IN THE MIDDLE OF A CIRCUS. Why wasn’t it suggested that the robot was going to be resurrected? Noone even seemed sad after his passing.

Still kinda too boring for me though. I have to get to the “Greatest Robot On Earth” arc before someone licenses Pluto, though.