Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto began in Big Comic Original on 9 September 2003 and finished on 1 April 2009: 65 chapters, eight collected volumes. It reworks an arc Osamu Tezuka drew for Astro Boy in 1964, with Macoto Tezka supervising and Takashi Nagasaki co-writing. Where the original put Astro at the centre, this version follows Gesicht, a Europol detective who happens to be a robot.
The case opens with Mont Blanc, a mountain guide robot in Switzerland, found destroyed. A campaigner for robot rights is murdered next, and both scenes are staged the same way, with horn-shaped objects placed beside the body. Gesicht works out that the seven most powerful robots in the world are being hunted one by one, and that he is one of the seven. The detective frame is real, but what the book keeps returning to is memory: what a machine does with the things it cannot delete, and what a machine becomes once it has learned to hate.
Characters carry the aftermath of a war in different shapes, some as victims and some as perpetrators, often both at once. That is why the series is so often cited as a case of a boys’ manga arc rewritten for adult readers. An animated adaptation followed in 2023. Eight volumes is a single sitting for a patient reader, and no prior knowledge of Astro Boy is required.
