Manga Revisited: Pluto
Aug. 12th, 2020 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerMany books worth reading are worth re-reading for me, but when it comes to the manga I’ve shelved or stacked in various places, thinking “I enjoyed that series” or even “it would be interesting to revisit this story in one push now that I don’t have to wait for new volumes” doesn’t seem to help me that much in the face of a constant flow of new product. At last, though, one day I not only had the time sink of my internet connection tied up saving videos but thought myself a little low on unread volumes of manga. My thoughts turned to one particular stack somewhat separate from most of my other manga, and I picked up Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto again.
Going by the dates on the copyright pages, I may have had the series stacked up for just over a decade. Back then, I suppose, I’d been buying the releases from Viz with some caution after twice ceasing just about all purchases from that company when certain panels got retouched. (That hasn’t been a played-up scandal for a while, but recent reports of “light novel” volumes being withdrawn from particular retailers or shut out of entire countries over skeevy illustrations could be something to worry about...) Now, I could just delve into the elaborately expanded retelling of one of Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom/“Astro Boy” stories, even if I got a bit conscious from the afterwords this seemed a matter of “adults returning to a story they’d taken in as children.” The obvious danger there is to stumble into the minefields strewn around the multifold attempts to
“do something with nostalgia” over here, or at least give away I don’t know as much about that as I only suppose I do. I was conscious, too, that I don’t have the same deep-rooted feelings towards Astro Boy, even if I did happen to see a little bit of the “1980 remake” in my youth, which I recall including a fragment of an episode adapting the original story, but which hadn’t grabbed me the same way Robotech or even Voltron had. I turned to the Dark Horse Astro Boy releases only as I took in this later work, and this year I sped through the original story on something of a lark after I’d read through its expansion, if to notice most of the big twists seemed there in embryo to start with. Anyway, I did manage this time around to pick up on a few references to other works by Tezuka, and there’s always something to chew on about “robots” and “artificial intelligences” even if my own formative examples of which include See-Threepio, Artoo-Deetoo, and the assorted possibly-knockoffs of Disney’s The Black Hole.
Going by the dates on the copyright pages, I may have had the series stacked up for just over a decade. Back then, I suppose, I’d been buying the releases from Viz with some caution after twice ceasing just about all purchases from that company when certain panels got retouched. (That hasn’t been a played-up scandal for a while, but recent reports of “light novel” volumes being withdrawn from particular retailers or shut out of entire countries over skeevy illustrations could be something to worry about...) Now, I could just delve into the elaborately expanded retelling of one of Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom/“Astro Boy” stories, even if I got a bit conscious from the afterwords this seemed a matter of “adults returning to a story they’d taken in as children.” The obvious danger there is to stumble into the minefields strewn around the multifold attempts to
“do something with nostalgia” over here, or at least give away I don’t know as much about that as I only suppose I do. I was conscious, too, that I don’t have the same deep-rooted feelings towards Astro Boy, even if I did happen to see a little bit of the “1980 remake” in my youth, which I recall including a fragment of an episode adapting the original story, but which hadn’t grabbed me the same way Robotech or even Voltron had. I turned to the Dark Horse Astro Boy releases only as I took in this later work, and this year I sped through the original story on something of a lark after I’d read through its expansion, if to notice most of the big twists seemed there in embryo to start with. Anyway, I did manage this time around to pick up on a few references to other works by Tezuka, and there’s always something to chew on about “robots” and “artificial intelligences” even if my own formative examples of which include See-Threepio, Artoo-Deetoo, and the assorted possibly-knockoffs of Disney’s The Black Hole.