Pluto - Volume 8 (final)

The final volume of Pluto came out. For those of you that are not familiar with Pluto, it is a Japanese comics series by Naoki Urasawa based on a story out of the great Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム). The series received lots of media attention before it even started. Urasawa, who is thought to be one of the most talented and successful cartoonist of his time, taking on a spin-off of his childhood influence, Tezuka's masterpiece, Astro Boy, had drawn mixed responses. The Pluto story arc is considered to be one of the best works done by Tezuka, the founding father of the Japanese anime industry, and there were suspicions that it might be too big of a story to handle even for an accomplished cartoonist like Urasawa.

When the much anticipated first volume of Pluto came out, people were pleasantly surprised by the take that Urasawa has taken on it. The story is told from a point of view of Gesicht, a German police inspector robot that makes a relatively brief appearance in the original. Although most of the major characters are shared between Pluto and the original, Urasawa has managed to make them his own characters by changing their looks greatly (yet still identifiable) and also supplying them with rich side-stories that were not part of the original story. The added side stories have introduced a lot more depth to Pluto compared to the original and you really get to know each of the characters, their personalities and where they are coming from. Urasawa's interpretation of the Pluto story arc was so superb that even though for those of us that have read the original know exactly what would happen next, still kept us highly curious and excited about how he would unfold the story.

In the final volume of Pluto, Gesicht is deceased and the story revolves around Atom who has inherited Gesicht's computer chip and hence all of his memory. The story touches on many issues we have in our society today such as war and war-time crimes, racism, environmental issues, etc. As they are in the real world, these issues are not solved easily. Pluto, like its original Astro Boy, is not a comics series that everything resolves at the end and everyone is happy. Rather, its aim, I feel, is to make us aware of how imperfect this world we live in is. It is ironic that the message of world peace that Tezuka has tried to communicate in Astro Boy over 40 years ago is still very much relevant to our world today in 2009.