Pluto

Pluto is a 8-volume manga series by Naoki Urasawa, who I know from his awesome manga Monster. I picked up this manga because of my interest in Osamu Tezuka. This series is Naoki’s imagination of The Greatest Robot on Earth, a story from Tezuka’s Astro Boy series.

The story is set in an Earth were AI is omnipresent and humanoid robots are living among humans. Robots have rights, can marry other robots and have robot children. Somebody has started to brutally murder the seven greatest robots on Earth one by one. Investigating the case is Gesicht, the greatest police detective and himself one of those seven robots. The case takes him across Europe, Persia and Japan and later brings us to Tezuka’s favorite creations: Atom and Professor Ochanomizu.

Naoki creates some great characters and the plot is quite intriguing. There is some great imagination of robots living with humans, robot emotions and feelings. The scientific reasoning and logic though have not dated well and the less said about it the better. What you do get is some excellent story telling, the futility of war and hatred and in the penultimate volume some giant robot battles involving Atom.

Rating: 3/4