Sound familiar? Yeah, Urasawa is not particularly subtle in drawing his parallels between this war that sets the stage for Pluto and the war in Iraq. Gesicht tries to hunt this killer down while grappling with his own strange issues and the aftermath of a massive war in Persia, which began when the United States of Thracia accused the country of having robots of mass destruction. Something is trying to kill the world’s most powerful robots (Gesicht himself is one of these) and the human creators of robot rights legislation.

Everyone is feeling a lot of feels in this series.īasically, Urasawa reworks an Astro Boy story arc, “ The Greatest Robot on Earth”, to tell it from the point of view of the robot detective Gesicht. I think it might be the most moving thing Urasawa has ever written, which only stands to reason, given that a large part of the story hinges on the world’s most powerful robots developing powerful human emotions. I don’t think I cried once when I read the series the first time, but I could not stop tearing up reading it this time. (There is always tragedy.) I think Pluto was the first of his works where I actually felt invested during the first book, maybe because at eight books, this series is one of his shortest works, so he had to pick up the pace a bit.Īnd maybe because it’s so short, it has so much more of an impact when you read it all at once, without the year-long wait for the next book. There’s something about his storytelling style that needs that slow burn, to really bring you in and give you time to get invested in his characters, so that you really care once you get to the twists and turns and tragedies. I almost stopped reading Monster after the first book because it didn’t really grab me. I liked Pluto the first go round, but my socks were not knocked off? Urasawa is a great storyteller with stellar timing, perfectly thought out twists and turns, and sympathetic characters walking down the paths he’s laid out for them. Of course, I could have followed along with the release of each chapter in Big Comic Original, but we all know how I feel about manga magazines. This is the problem with serialized manga.

Which means the effect was somewhat diluted? Getting a volume every year or so gave me plenty of time to forget what had happened before and lose any connection I had with the characters. I read the series as it was released in Japanese, which means it took me six years to read the whole thing.

(Even if, like me, you have your issues with it.) But if you have the cash, you should probably think about buying it. Your library probably has it if you don’t have the cash to keep this series on your shelf permanently. You don’t even need to read what I have to say about it. Have you read Pluto? It’s out in English, you know.

Naoki urasawa pluto manga