Urasawa's Craft and Pluto as a Fiercely Original Work: My Treatise Concluded

In my previous installments in this series, I looked at the individual volumes of Naoki Urasawa's transformative masterpiece Pluto. (Click here for my other reviews in the series.) Here in my eighth and final review (split into three parts), I look at the themes, story and art in the series as a whole. 

In the first part of my treatise, I examined The Role of Hatred, Redemption, and Evolution in Pluto. In the second part I looked at Humanity and the Role of Memory in Subjective Reality in Pluto and I also examined the Effects of War and Urasawa's commentary on the Iraq War and American Imperialism.

Here in the third and final part, I examine Urasawa's craft and Pluto's role as a fiercely original work. I also give an overview of my reviews of the individual volumes. 

Urasawa's craft

I cannot say enough about Urasawa's level of craftsmanship at work - Pluto is the vibrant and electric work of a master storyteller. His and Nagasaki's exposition throughout is masterful and unobtrusive, a difficult task in any science fiction work. He metes out details of Gesicht's past in a way that builds to an emotional crescendo, with the revelations in the end both expected and emotionally overwhelming. Urasawa's handling of everything from suspense-filled conversations and massive battles, emotion and action, is all pitch-perfect.

Urasawa's staging of even simple events utilize the comic medium in simple and very effective ways. In our first exposure to Gesicht, it appears he is talking on a cell phone, when we know that he was simply holding his hand to his ear while communicating with someone remotely. (Much can be said about robot communications throughout the work which really amounts to powerful, long-range telepathy.) In Gesicht and Helena's final conversation, it appears they are in the same room, but they are communicating remotely. This is not a cheap trick but a brilliant and obvious bit of storytelling utilizing the established confines of robot communication. The result is more poignant and powerful expression of their bond, and the events that subsequently occur are that much more tragic.

The future presented in the story has a unique flavor to it. Pluto takes place many decades, if not many centuries in Earth's future. Despite it's far flung nature and the presence of nearly human artificial intelligences, the world is recognizable. The fashions worn by the characters are those of this current day and age, the geopolitical scene an identifiable pastiche of known nations and thinly disguised analogues. The biggest difference is in the level of technology (largely represented in the robots of the story) and the densely packed and stratospheric cities. Urasawa presents a bold vision of the future that does not get bogged down in unnecessary detail. One of the many strength's of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples current ongoing series Saga, despite the broadly exotic fantasy/sci-fi setting, is that there are purely recognizable elements like current slang and technology like iPods and televisions and printed books. Why take creative energy to make fictionalizations, be it in name or design, of common things that serves only slow down the narrative? The focus of both Saga and Pluto is on the characters and their emotions and actions, not in sci-fi minutiae. The story of Pluto leaps forward, propelled by the characters, unencumbered by needless detail while still reveling in its fantastic elements.

And then there is the use of color in the art. In the work's initial publication, the first eight pages of each individual chapter were in color. In the collected editions this is limited to the first eight pages of each volume. Color throughout would not really work given Urasawa's very fine line, especially in his dense, almost photorealistic depictions of cities and towns. But there is selective use of color in the story, playing an important role. Very much like the limited use of color in Steven Spielberg's otherwise black-and-white film Schindler's List, the sparing, limited and laser-focused use of color in the body of Pluto is powerful and evocative. Both instances revolve around Sahad. When Uran finds Pluto, on the run from himself in a hijacked body seeking out the part of himself that was once Sahad, he scrawls impressionistic, abstract graffiti on a wall. It isn't until Uran brings him color to paint with that the intent of the image becomes obvious: Pluto paints a field of flowers (a recurring motif throughout the story). It is the part of himself that was Sahad reaching out through the tortured soul of Pluto, creating a moving work that is presented by Urasawa in full color in contrast to the black-and-white surroundings. This effect signals the significance of the painting, not just for the moment, but for the story. (Urasawa repeats this image with Darius in his cell.) The other moment comes when Gesicht learns of Sahad from the flower merchant in Amsterdam. The origin of the name Pluto is not in the God of the Underworld but in the tulip Sahad creates, a flower that destroys all life around it but perseveres for years even in the harsh environs of the Persian desert. The single red flower stands alone in the field, in the bell jar, and on the page, and its revelation is a moment of extreme import in the story, the significance signaled and added by the startling, bold rouge.

Pluto the adaptation, as a fiercely original work

The covers and promotional material for Pluto lists the work as by URASAWA x TEZUKA. This is a generous bit of crediting (and clever marketing) by Urasawa. In actuality, Pluto was written and produced by Naoki Urasawa with Takashi Nagasaki and illustrated by Naoki Urasawa based on Osamu Tezuka's original creations. And in actuality, it is a distinctly original work with its own identity, a reflection of Urasawa's vision.  

Pluto defines itself immediately as something more than just an Astro Boy story. The central character is not at first Astro Boy, but Inspector Gesicht, a detective for Europol who is investigating a series of murders committed against robots and humans linked to a recently concluded war in Iran. The murders are grisly crimes committed against beloved robots and renown human scientists alike, with connections all the way to the leadership of several global powers. Set against a backdrop both futuristic and completely recognizable, the story grows to encompass themes of loss, identity, vengeance, and the very core of the human condition. And the story takes place at an axis of profound societal transformation at the dawn of a new human species and where no less than the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The focus of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" storyline on which Pluto is based is apparently more on the robot-fight aspect of the story, while Pluto goes in far more and far deeper directions.

Urasawa apparently hits many similar story points to Tezuka's original, specifically the characters used and the deaths of the most advanced robots. I don't know, I haven't read it. And you don't need to, Pluto stands on its own. Its very easy to find analogues of what Urasawa accomplishes. You could easily look at any of the modern masterworks of the superhero genre as important and original takes on classic characters and concepts. Or perhaps Don Rosa's masterpiece, The Life and Times of Scooge McDuck, inhabiting and expanding on Carl Barks' own seminal works. But I think a better comparison is the Batman film-cycle of Christopher Nolan. In it, Nolan takes the core concepts that have been around for decades and crafts startlingly original works of art, mature pieces of deeply commentary science fiction wrapped in riveting, suspenseful action packed character dramas. Which is Pluto to a tee.

And the deciding factor of Pluto's originality, the core that brings forth all of the themes I outline above, is the character of Inspector Gesicht. Urasawa's Gesicht - German for "face," both the face of Urasawa's vision and the representative face of the newly evolving robot kind - is one of the best characters of the new graphic canon. So much more than just a determined and intelligent investigator, Gesicht is consistently portrayed with a sense of humanistic morality and genuine emotion. Gesicht's humanity far outshines the actual humans of the story (with the possible exception of Ochanomizu). He goes out of his way to save the damaged robot that would become his daughter, in one of the most touching and emotional sequences in the work. His murder of Haas, despite the wrongness of the act, is one of the most understandably human reactions in the story. And in his decision to not kill Pluto in defiance of his orders signals his redemption - the decision not only signals a sea-change in the potentiality of robot-kind, but saves Hoffman and shows that his morality, not willing to kill an innocent being, is intact. Urasawa's Gesicht, complex, contradictory, three dimensional, is one of the best characters in comics, his Maggie Chascarillo, his Morpheus, his Peter Parker. The emotional connection the reader makes to him is strong, his passing and aftermath a major blow. His closing moments in life - his redemption, the extraordinary staging of his last conversation with Helena, and the manner of his death - and the revelation in the final volume of the details behind the saving (and loss) of his daughter, are some of the most genuinely moving moments ever portrayed in comics.

I do not have a lot of experience reading manga. This is not an aversion on my part, just a dual matter of availability and finding that small fraction of "good." I have read some Tatsumi, tried some One Piece (it is, after all, the best-selling comic on the planet, but not one for me), and even some Tezuka, but my manga exposure is woefully thin, something I am slowly rectifying. I picked up Pluto on a whim - I was familiar with Urasawa's reputation, I liked the production design, and when flipping it open I was struck by the detail of Urasawa's art. Deciding to read it, the story hooked me completely by the point Gesicht informs Robby's widow of her death. In the end I was definitely shocked by how superb the overall story was, and on rereading struck by the sustained intensity of the masterpiece. It is a work that rewards rereading and the experience of absorbing this work is one of the most rewarding interactions with a work of fiction I have ever had. This is one of my all time favorite comics of any kind.

Pluto is a work that is required reading, and should be taught as one of the signature achievements of the medium, very different from but in the same critical league as the comic masterworks of Los Bros Hernandez, Chris Ware, Alan Moore, Jack Kirby, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Warren Ellis, Jason Aaron, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Moebius, Carla Speed McNeill, Brian K. Vaughan, Kevin Huizenga, and Osamu Tezuka himself.

There's a lot going on in this work...

...clearly, and I've only just scratched the surface of all the extraordinary things Urasawa accomplishes here. Pluto is an intelligent and layered work that rewards multiple readings and stays with you long after you put it down.


Further Reading:
"Pluto and Doubling" by Craig Fischer, The Comics Journal October, 2011
"Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience" by Peter Wilkins, The Comics Grid January, 2012

An Exploration and Analysis of Humanity, Subjective Reality, and War in Naoki Urasawa's Pluto

In my previous installments in this series, I looked at the individual volumes of Naoki Urasawa's transformative masterpiece Pluto. (Click here for my other reviews in the series.) Here in my eighth and final review (split into three parts), I look at the themes, story and art in the series as a whole. 

In the first part of my treatise, I examined The Role of Hatred, Redemption, and Evolution in Pluto. In the second part presented here, I look at The Inhumanity of Humans and the Role of Memory in Subjective Reality in Pluto. I also examine the Effect of War and Urasawa's commentary on the Iraq War and American Imperialism.  

Please note that unlike my earlier reviews, there are spoilers ahead!

Robot Rights and the inhumanity of human beings

The robot rights movement presented in the story is touched on lightly but is an important aspect of the work. Robot rights are presented as a recent development, but in light of the emotional and intellectual heights achieved by robot kind, an absolutely necessary one. Robots have only recently been granted civil rights, but many humans still see robots as thralls to human desires or as objects meant to be used and disposed. The fury of Gesicht's superiors when he refuses to take out Pluto is as much at Gesicht's insubordination as it is in their view that robots are only meant to follow human orders and desires, to fulfill the function of their creation and nothing more.

The body of Robby, the police officer-bot who fell in the line of duty, is unceremoniously dumped in the trash, and only Gesicht marks the passing by salvaging Robby's memory chip. Indeed, Gesicht recovers his first child, Robita, in a dump. Robita's discovery is not treated like a found object but like finding a living human child in a pile of corpses. The moment Robita reaches out to Gesicht is a moment of seismic power. Gesicht is moved to action to save her life, the human recycler is moved to profit, her body an object to be sold. The inhumanity of the human willing to dispose of her and the humanity of Gesicht in willing to save her is a significant illustration of the gulf that still exists. The events leading to Robita's adoption can be seen as commentary on everything from slavery to genocide, and is a good illustration of the unique power of Pluto as a humanist work of transcendent science fiction.

A human presented to be more robotic than his creations is Tenma. He is presented consistently as cold and inhuman. Despite being kidnapped by the most advanced robot alive - an insane murderer he essentially created - and presented with evidence of the eminent end of the world, he is nonplussed. After creating Atom to replace his dead son, Tobio, he coldly analyzes Atom's failures as a copy and sells him to the circus. Into slavery. It is his loss of Tobio, the recurring theme of the death of a child that resonates with many characters throughout the story (Abullah, Gesicht, the nameless victims in Persia, the multiple survivors of the evil Haas's victims), that presumably creates this cold inhumanity in Tenma. The robots in the story are shown to react with grief - even if they couldn't fully express it like the parents of Haas's victims - to anger and revenge, in essence human reactions. Tenma, on the other hand, is so broken by his loss that he becomes frankly inhuman. His descriptions of the anger he sometimes felt towards Tobio are like the cold analysis of someone else entirely, a robot describing human emotion. And from the unethical and questionable sanity of trying to create a robotic substitute for his lost son to his unceremonious dumping of that failed project, Tenma is the most inhuman character being presented. He is too far gone, too lost.

Thankfully for Atom there is Ochanomizu. It is telling that Uran, Ochanomizu's creation, is such a powerful empath, a being of pure kindness who can sense emotion, be it from animals or humans or robots, even from kilometers away. Ochanomizu is shown to be kind to robots and humans and animals alike, going to great lengths to save a discarded dog-bot in one of the series most emotional sequences. Despite his own losses - he is a widower - he maintains the core of his humanity, the kindness that marks his character also marking his great creation, Uran. And it is Ochanomizu who saves Atom from a life of subjugation to live out his life like any boy his age.

Just like Robita's disposal, that Atom - not just one of the most powerful artificial intelligences and advanced robots alive but a sentient being - could be so casually disposed of, sold into virtual slavery, is another telling example of the gulf of inhumanity that exists among humans in their interactions with robot kind and the lengths that still must be traveled to achieve some semblance of equality.

The role of memory in subjective reality

Memories make us who we are. Our entire experience as human beings, our interaction with objective reality, is in the subjective reality of our minds, in the constant stream of the past, of memory that builds and constantly flows. The human perception of time, of reality itself, is subjective and memory-focused. There is no "now" but the "just-now." Experience as memory.

Our memories and our experience of subjective reality are locked away in our brains, inseparable from our being (though Abullah with Tenma, the supreme geniuses that they both are, find a way to transcend those limitations in Abullah-bot's creation). Our locked subjective reality is unable to be shared except through literal description or artistic expression. But the robots in Pluto do not share this limitation. They can share not just their memories, but their very subjective experience of objective reality, even exceeding the bounds of death.

We see several memory chip swaps in the series, once between Gesicht and Brau. Brau (like Atom when he examines Gesicht's memory chip) is able to see Gesicht's hidden memories of what really happened in the replaced time in his memory. Gesicht sees Brau's subjective reality, one defined by abstract images of blood and numbers and warped reality and horror beyond Gesicht's ability to handle.

Robots are also in the position of erasing their memories, or in the case of Gesicht and Helena, having their memories replaced entirely against their will. When Gesicht killed the murderer Haas, to protect their investment and to cover up what would certainly be a society-shaking scandal, Europol erased Gesicht's experience and everything that led up to it and replaced it with false memories of a vacation. Helena and Gesicht's memories of that time are so vivid and specific, but this reality which their subjective experience tells them is real is entirely fabricated, not reflected in the objective reality of the time period. Gesicht and Helena slowly come to this revelation, but ultimately it is only Gesicht who finds out the whole truth.

There are two powerful and important moments in the series, mirrors of each other, regarding the option of erasing memory. In both, the widow of a fallen officer is given the option of erasing their memory of their dead love, and in both, the widow rejects the offer. Better to live with the pain than to forget the good of those they loved. Because for robots (and one could argue, humans) erasing of memory equals erasing their loved one from reality itself. For Robby's wife, she goes one step further by inserting Robby's chip into her. Despite the pain that reliving his final moments may cause her, she takes the risk to experience her husband's memories, his subjective reality, him. In just one of many breath-taking moments in the series, she puts her hand to her heart: "He's... He's right *here*" 

One of my favorite films is Steven Soderberg's Solaris, itself a superb modern adaptation. In it, a sentient world reaches into the minds of several human beings and uses their memories to create simulacrums of people from their past. These entities are nothing more than the memories of the individual from which they sprang, and are even aware of their nature. But more importantly, at the very end one human chooses death on the alien world where in the final moments of his life he is preserved in a time loop where he can live with the memory of his deceased love, both nothing more than constructs, shades of humans now passed. In Robby's widow's accepting Robby into her being, she achieves something similar though less fatalistic, to be with her husband, the very essence of him, even if he cannot be alive. The profound effect on her is something far outside the frame of normal human reference.

There is a similar moment involving Atom and Helena. Atom sees Helena before he meets what may be his final fate. In moments loaded with meaning, silent panels of extraordinary and profound power, Helena is moved to tears at Atom being alive and Gesicht being a part of him. And it is through Atom that Helena is told of the power of Gesicht's love for her. "And he wanted to tell you that no matter what happened to him, you would never be alone." Not in the literal sense of what Robby's wife does, but in the deeply human sense of subjective memory and experience that we all share. That she felt his love for her, and through her memories of him that she continues to carry, she will continue to carry her memory, her subjective reality, with her.

Commentary on the American-Iraq war and American Imperialism

Pluto was produced and released in a six year period from 2003 to 2009, a period notably marked by the United States invasion of Iraq. America under Bush was - though some would surely argue America in general is - a country marked by imperialistic tendencies, subjecting the world to unnecessary war. The American claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the subsequent invasion ostensibly based on those fears, the revelations that there were no WMDs and no reason to invade a country that had no role in the terrorist attacks that had ignited the American War Machine play a major role in the world's current opinion of political America. It is really quite clear reading Pluto that Urasawa was absolutely furious at America for the War, and so much of the geopolitical elements in Pluto are a thinly veiled attack of Bush doctrine, the war and occupation of Iraq, and on the very idea of American exceptionalism.

Every country represented in Pluto is literal - nations throughout Europe and the Pacific rim are name-checked without obfuscation - with the exception of America and Iraq. This is very telling. It is quite obvious that the United States of Thracia is meant to represent The United States of America, that Persia is meant to represent Iran as much as Iraq. To actually use America and Iraq might have been too literal, too representative of the conflict raging at the time, so Urasawa and Nagasaki resort to invention. This obvious allusion allows Urasawa to absolutely let loose his anger and disgust. It is very, very clear that Urasawa is against the war in Iraq and the 39th Central Asian War of the story is an obvious commentary on the Iraq War. His anger at America is white-hot. He repeatedly shows the human cost of the War on the civilian populace of Persia. When we flash back to Gesicht's role in the War, we see him confronted by a father whose children had been killed in the bombing. Noting the human loss, Atom calls the conflict a quagmire (a frequently used term to describe the American occupation of Iraq). And if not for the War, then maybe Sahad's dream of a verdant Persia would have seen fruition. If not for the war, Abullah would not have lost his family.

But Persia is not without fault and thus the analogues are not quite that clear-cut. It is not simply an unjust invasion of Persia by the United States, the realities of the conflict that was the 39th Central Asian War are far more complex. In Iraq, the U.S. simply accused Iraq of having WMDs and simply invaded and occupied. Where Iraq had a natural resource that American powers wanted access to - oil, of course - there was no such analogue for Persia. Rather, at the very end of the story we finally see the (unnamed) Thracian President admit that his reasoning wasn't robot WMDs but Persia's massive robot army, which Persia did have, and which Thracia - advanced in every area except robotics - could not match. And there are other complications. In the lead-up to the war, Darius XIV is shown to be actively destabilizing the region and invading neighboring countries. This alone might justify an international response, but the United States went to the steps of legislating against the creation of superpowerful robots, then accusing Persia of harboring them. Like with Iraq's alleged WMDs, no evidence is found of WMD robots, but the irony was that Persia not only was trying to build one, but succeeded in creating one when Abullah input his personality into Tenma's failed creation. And on top of that, Persia had in its arsenal Pluto, a climate-effecting robot capable of massive destruction itself, and Bora, a world-shattering robot with an anti-proton bomb at its core.

And Darius's offenses against his own people were extreme. Although he put on an air of protecting robot rights, the robot graveyard that the Bora Survey Group uncovers and Epsilon must dispose of certainly showed the opposite. But despite these complicating factors, America, as Thracia, is still shown to be a force of, if not necessarily evil, than certainly ill-intent and incompetence in clear commentary on George W. Bush. The Thracian president is shown to be a direct puppet of the most powerful AI on Earth, Dr. Roosevelt. The War and the Pluto Murders are shown to be part of Roosevelt's overall plan to achieve Robot domination of Earth, with Roosevelt as the eventual leader of both Robot and (through the Thracian President) Human kind. Naturally, the Thracian President is oblivious to this. He is shown to be a simpering thrall to Roosevelt, assured of Thracia's righteousness. Towards the end, when threatened by Darius who most definitely knows of Abullah's plans to use Bora to destroy the world, the Thracian President smiles, "Sorry to tell you, pal, but that stuff doesn't apply here. The only thing we have here is Prosperity! And the good ol' United States of Thracia will prosper forever!" This is a clear attack on the idea of American exceptionalism that was posited by so many of its representatives and leaders during the Iraq conflict. And in the end it is Thracia that suffers with vast swaths of the continent and many of its cities in ruin.

And something of note is the thematic similarity to Ronald D. Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica in the commentary on Bush era American foreign policy. There are other similarities - both were produced in the same exact time period, both are stories involving humanoid robots, both are adaptations of earlier work that far transcend the source material. But there the similarities end, especially in quality. (Battlestar Galictica is an entertaining television show that is hampered by consistently inconsistent characterization, a sprawling and uneven story, and a terrible ending.) Battlestar Galactica excels in its commentary on the U.S. War on Terror and the Occupation of Iraq, but it never specifically references either, increasing the power of the story and allusions. It's hard to say if Pluto would have been strengthened by loosing the specificity of allusion to the United States and the War in Iraq, and at times the obviousness of it risks taking the reader out of the story. But, as the story is not about the specifics of the war but uses the specific war as a springboard into commentary on the scars of war itself (while expressing anger at that specific war), 

The scars of War

So we've seen that the 39th Central Asian War was Urasawa's response to America's invasion of Iraq, but there is more than just geopolitical commentary at work. It's not just the specific war that Urasawa is commenting on, but the very idea of war itself.

The scars of fighting in the War effect everyone who survived it. Several robots are shown to be suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. North No. 2 suffers nightmares of his time in the war. In a powerful and moving flashback, at the height of the War Hercules comes across a robot who is constantly washing his hands. And no matter how hard that robot tries, the blood - virtual because the victims are other robots, but no less real to him - will not wash off. As much as everything that Hercules went through in the war, it is this memory that disturbs him. An astonishing visual and a moving example of the way that war can leave behind a legacy of pain.

In one of the first flashbacks to the conflict, Mont Blanc is shown in a field of robot corpses. He takes no satisfaction in what he had to do, and the killing fields before him, the vast majority of bodies lying there at his hand, give no joy. Brando asks him how many he killed. In a nonspecific response uncharacteristic of a robot, he can only manage "A lot." He sits in stunned silence. There is no sense of winning in the victory, not when there is so much death. And humans suffer greatly in the conflict. Thousands die. Abullah loses his family, their lifeless bodies limp in his arms. It is the power of this loss that drives him into revenge, a vengeance so profound that even death will not hold him back. It is what he went through in the War, what he lost, that drives him mad, that puts him in a robot body and splits his personality between Abullah and Goji and eventually Bora.

The revenge that Abullah and Darius seek are part of a cycle of hate that started with the War and continues to echo down through the years. Epsilon recognizes the cycle of hatred before it begins and does everything within his power to counteract it. He refuses to fight, he raises war orphans, he even avoids conflict with Pluto until the very end. But even he ends up a victim to that cycle, and the vengeance of Abullah.

There is no victimless war, and it is shown to effect of those who waged the war on the front lines and those who felt the wrath of weapons and manpower. And while the Thracian President was shown to be aloof and above the effects of the war, in the end his country gets its comeuppance, wrecked as the last echo and the last aftershock of the war he started.

My treatise concludes in part three with a look at Urasawa's craft, Pluto the adaptation as a fiercely original work, and my final overview of the series.

Nature, Evolution and Hatred in Naoki Urasawa's Pluto

In my previous installments in this series, I looked at the individual volumes of Naoki Urasawa's transformative masterpiece Pluto. (Click here for my other reviews in the series.) Here in my eighth and final review (split into three parts), I look at the themes, story and art in the series as a whole. 

In the first part presented here, I introduce my treatise and examine The Role of Hatred in the Human Experience, Redemption through the Rejection of Nature, and Robot Evolution as presented in Pluto.  Please note that unlike my earlier reviews, there are spoilers ahead!

Pluto is a Naoki Urasawa's adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomo, known in America as Astro Boy. Writing and Producing partners Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki first approached Macoto Tezka (Osamu Tezuka's son and producer behind current Tezuka properties) about adapting the work for release beginning in 2003, the fictional Astro Boy's birthday. To say the task was daunting is an understatement. Tezuka is rightly revered around the world as the father of manga, one of the most prolific cartoonists in history. Urasawa originally intended to do an homage to one of the most popular Astro Boy stories, "The Greatest Robot on Earth," using a very Tezuka-influenced style. Tezka rejected this pitch, insisting Urasawa do his own thing, to use the core of Tezuka's creations to tell his own story, his own way. This was a bold but logical decision by Tezka, to essentially give free reign to Urasawa, one of Japan's best regarded cartoonists best known for his serial killer thriller Monster and his sprawling, decades-spanning 20th Century Boys. The story that Urasawa created, published in 65 monthly installments and collected in 8 graphic novels, is a vibrantly original masterwork, equal parts character drama, mystery, thriller, and science fiction parable. And it is undeniably one of the greatest comics ever made.

Pluto is an extraordinary character drama wrapped in one of the most intense science fiction thrillers ever produced. A transformative work of science fiction that utilizes the genre to explore multiple aspects of the human condition with astonishing depth and incisiveness, this is a story about the darkest aspects of our nature, the evils of war and the scars of war that echo down through the years. This is a work equally at home in hyper dense future cityscapes, world-shaking sci-fi action set-pieces, quiet conversations dripping with suspense, and the mentally tumultuous moments of loss and despair that define the human experience. This phenomenal comic is a murder mystery, a riveting international thriller, an otherworldly yet completely grounded work of science fiction, a surprisingly scary work of horror both overt & visually frightening, subtle & psychological.

And it is about the power of love to break the cycle of hate, the beauty within to overcome the darkness.

Pluto is a daring, revolutionary, bold, visionary, transcendent work. It is exciting, riveting, moving, and beautiful. This is a towering work of manga, and one of the finest literary achievements of the comic form.

I know I'm using a lot of lofty adjectives here, but they are all well deserved. There are other comparable works of fiction that attempt and achieve everything Pluto does, but Pluto manages to be greater than the considerable sum of its parts. It is a fantastic comic in every conceivable aspect. From strength to strength, Urasawa and Nagasaki's writing to Urasawa's art to the Viz Signature editions that are gloriously well designed and packaged with superb translations from Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt. 

Below I explore some of the themes and ideas Urasawa puts forth in this amazing and layered masterwork.

The role of hatred in the human experience.

An important recurring theme throughout the work is the power of hate. The cycle of hatred ignited by War results in the assassinations of the most advanced robots in the world and the members of the Bora Survey Group. The targeting of the Robots who were following orders, and the Bora Group members who found nothing, wasn't a rational response. But hate isn't rational. The pure bloodthirsty vengeance by Abullah (and Darius) was searing directionless anger looking to make anyone pay for the losses suffered. Abullah's hatred would grow to encompass all of humanity, a humanity that had taken away his family.

When Gesicht's child is kidnapped and killed by the criminal Haas, Adolph's wayward brother, Gesicht is overcome by anger and hatred. He kills Haas in cold blood, an act not previously considered possible by a robot. The legacy of hatred follows Gesicht for years. Adolph Haas hates Gesicht - as much as, seemingly at the end, Gesicht hates himself - for murdering Adolph's brother.

The seeming center of the story is not just the the endless cycle of hatred, but the role of hatred in the human experience. Hatred is also arguably the key to robot evolution, an emotion that no-one believes possible in Artificial Intelligence, the catalyst that tips the balance into increasing humanity. Gesicht's actions are unthinkable for many reasons, but wouldn't have been possible without the motivation of loss and anger that fuels his unexpected hate. Humans are beings whose actions are often dictated by the emotional mind. Extreme emotion can short circuit the rational mind, and what humans are capable under emotional duress can surprise and shock the individuals who find themselves acting out of character. Hate has the power to shatter the barriers of programming, literal robot programming and the social mores that say murder and revenge are wrong. Gesicht's actions are almost understandable if not necessarily excusable: just moments after getting word that his son had been murdered, there in front of him lies the murderer. One cannot imagine the power of losing a child, let alone the acute mental turmoil that must occur when suddenly presented with the culprit. Who among us can say how they would react in such a situation? What Gesicht did was wrong, but who can actually blame him?

And in that flash reaction of hatred and punishment is Urasawa's most distilled argument on the nature of man, and robots' collective evolutionary ascension, a theme he returns to over and over. Abullah is the story's most advanced robot, but his very existence is predicated on his hatred. His body, Tenma's creation a formless shell in perfect balance before Abullah came to it, could only be awoken with extreme emotion: hatred and sadness. At the end of Abullah's strictly human life, he was completely consumed by hatred and grief, and those emotions carried over into his robot form, rendering him so completely human that even he is unaware of his own nature.

When Atom, Tenma's other great creation, is effectively killed midway into the story, his own body and artificial intelligence lie in the same state of formless balance that Abullah's body sat in. It would take the insertion of Gesicht's memory chip into Atom, with it's evolutionary core of hatred, as well as a flooding into his being of Epsilon's sadness at his own passing, to wake Atom. Atom is immediately transformed by this hatred, unlocking things within himself - both the formula for the anti-proton bomb that Abullah's own hatred unlocked in Bora, and in one of the story's most astonishing human moments of discovery, a stunning self-distrust and self-loathing.

At the Kimberly conference, Tenma warns of the dangers of robot evolution, that it is only achievable through sadness, anger, hatred, and pain. Perhaps this view is effected by Tenma's own experience - his creation of Atom, a changeling, a simulacrum, a facsimile - is deeply rooted in anger and grief. Urasawa seems to be making the same argument, though, that the key to humanity lies in these negative extremes. But in the end, it is the core of love and forgiveness inside Gesicht that redeems Atom, and the memory of the beauty and joy he achieved as Sahad that redeems Pluto - although even that is driven by his resentment of Abullah/Bora for the things committed against him. 

Human kind - and the burgeoning robot kind - are defined by emotion, especially the extremes of the emotional spectrum. And a big part of the human experience, and of the story, is about overcoming those aspects of our being, to find the better angels of our nature.

Redemption through the rejection of nature

At one moment in the work, Uran is seen reading and commenting on Pinocchio. Urasawa fairly beats you over the head with it: many of the characters are puppets, including the puppeteers. (Atom as Pinocchio isn't the point, everyone as Pinocchio is.) The robots following orders, the humans and evolved robots slaves to their emotions, and everyone a pawn in Roosevelt's grand scheme. Even Dr. Roosevelt, despite his almost god-like intelligence and ability to manipulate the entire course of human history, is trapped inside an immobile body and in need of someone to move him about, a puppeteer under his own control. And so much of the climax of the piece involves cutting the strings that guide us, to break free of our nature and take control.

At the end of his life, Gesicht is shown to still be consumed by the hatred that caused him to take a human life years before, but now this hatred is driven inward. But at the end, it is not only hatred present but great love. When confronted with orders to destroy Pluto, he rejects those orders. He disobeys his superiors, in complete contradiction of what a robot should do, indeed should be capable of doing. They demand that he kills Pluto, but Pluto is not threatening Gesicht and beyond the deal he knows he must make with Abullah to spare Hoffman's life, he knows that at Pluto's core lies Sahad, a gentle being manipulated into anger and hatred by Abullah. His superiors are shocked by Gesicht's refusal to take out Pluto - how can he spare this murderer's life when he was willing to kill a human in the past? But Gesicht has tipped the balance into something more. He is not just a police robot any more - he has become greater than the inherent possibilities of his nature, and this change does not come as a result of his hatred but by his ability to overcome not just his hatred but the programming at the core of his being. He moves beyond servitude and duty into the realm of freedom. Never before has a robot done what he does next, simply resigning his position and finally deciding to take that vacation with his wife that he's wanted since the opening pages of the story. He cuts the strings of Europol and his own programming. He doesn't want to fight anymore, not anyone else's battles, nor himself. He wants only to be with his wife, who he loves deeply, and to raise a family with her. To live. He achieves redemption of his prior acts by rejecting his nature and achieving more than any other member of his kind has ever achieved in the small, quiet moment of rebellion.

At the end of his journey, Sahad/Pluto redeems himself by rejecting the hatred that Abullah - his own father - has forced onto him. Pluto was manipulated by Abullah and driven to madness by his acts. He is programmed to hate and to kill, but this is not who he is. He is Sahad, the gentle soul who wants only to transform his homeland from barren wasteland to verdant eden. But he is turned into a killer and a fighter, forced to inhabit a grotesque body, a climate changing robot turned into a war machine. Rather than fight Atom he confronts Bora - his father, Abullah - at the heart of a caldera, defeating Bora before he could destroy the entire world.

And then there is North No. 2. A literal war machine who discovers in himself a musical aptitude, not just the ability to translate music, but to create it. And his journey to that point is marked by disobeying orders and seeking out answers far outside the bounds of his programming, be it as an instrument of war or as an aide to a person who does everything he can to reject him.

But at their moments of redemption, North No. 2, Gesicht and Sahad/Pluto lose their lives. Indeed Gesicht's death is very reminiscent of the deaths of several characters on the seminal 2000s television series The Wire who found redemption through change and exceeding the bounds of their nature or societal expectations only to be rewarded with their murder, inevitable and unavoidable - Bodie, Wallace, Frank Sobatka, even Omar. Both Gesicht and Sahad/Pluto's fates are sealed long before they get to their ends, but both ends were changed by their redemption. And it is in this redemption that we find another key to robot evolution. And robot evolution is something Urasawa comes to, again and again.

Robot evolution

We've seen how hatred and rejection of nature in Pluto are indicators of a larger change in robot kind, but this is but the tip of a much larger iceberg. The achievement of human emotion in robots long thought to be incapable of emotion is repeatedly shown to be occurring throughout the series. And one of the keys to this new evolution is grief.

The series has many powerful and evocative expressions of grief throughout. At the very beginning of the series, Gesicht visits the wife of a fallen officer, robots both. The moment of revelation of her loss and her reaction represents the first salvo in an exploration of grief that makes Pluto one of the most revolutionary graphic novels of its time. She has no face and no way of expressing that grief, but Urasawa's genius staging of the scene has us project our own thoughts about what she must be feeling onto her. And rest assured, she is grieving, feeling a loss so profound she can barely handle it. It is strongly hinted that she is indeed the service robot at Adolph Haas's house, and the effects of her loss are causing her to lose function.

Gesicht's grief at losing his son is what tips him into the realm of vengeance and murder. And Helena's loss of Gesicht is one of the most heartbreaking things in a story predicated on heartbreak. Months after having lost the man she loves at the moment he became something more, she is putting on airs of normality but is deeply suffering inside. After delivering Gesicht's memory chip to Tenma - the very essence of her husband - she finally breaks down into tears. The image of her own ascendance through grief into something more human than even what she thought herself capable of powerfully closes the series' best volume. Just as powerful are the later scenes of her shuffling through life, a hollow place in her soul where her husband used to be. Loss resounds in a way that can never really be fixed, and Urasawa's illustration of Helena's loss is moving, human, and very real.

And then, opposite of grief, there is the happiness and love of raising a family that multiple robots share. Brando is shown raising a large family and the sacrifices he makes are on their behalf. Epsilon runs a large home for war orphans, and they adore him. And Gesicht and Helena twice resolve to raise a child. This ability and willingness to raise human and/or robot children represents an important step in the evolution of robot kind. Because just as important to the human condition as hatred and anger and sadness is the power of love and companionship and laughter. And another important moment is shown, when Pluto paints the field of flowers for Uran. The painting is an abstract representation of memories he can't quite access, of his subjective reality outside the bonds of his tenuous sanity. Robots in Pluto are capable of literalism and can even swap memory chips to directly show memory and indeed their subjective reality, but abstraction is something they shouldn't be capable of. Not only is the damaged shade of Sahad able to create abstract art, North No. 2 is shown to be capable of learning and even creating music.

Pluto, as much a murder mystery and an international thriller and a science fiction parable, is a chronicle about the foundation of a new sentient species on Earth. At one point in one of my early drafts of one of my reviews of the story, I described the ascendance of the sentient and emotive robot kind as "the alien species arising around humanity," but that viewpoint is decidedly off the mark. By simple virtue of being designed by humans, the artificial intelligences that populate the Earth are reflections of the human brain and mind and being. The early emotions displayed by robots are simple mimicry, but are shown to be developing into something more than mimicry: actual human emotion. Not robot emotion, not some alien analogue of human emotion, but human emotion produced by artificial beings. These beings are human in all aspects but the makeup of their physical bodies.

And in Abullah and Brau 1589 we see the obliteration of the delicate lines between humanity and what we presume of robots. The capacity for untruth is something at first believed unachievable by artificial intelligence, but the more advanced the intelligence, the increased capacity for lying - a distinctly human trait. Abullah, once human, is now a robot so advanced, so perfect, that he is capable of lying to himself. (Atom and Roosevelt are also shown able to lie.) And then there is murder, not the murders that Gesicht or even Abullah commit, but the senseless taking of human life. Brau 1589 is described as flawless, yet he was capable of murder and Atom wonders if that is what being human is. And the answer is yes. Being human is about lying and hating and loving and killing and grieving and all of these things that robots are now capable of.

The many robots in Pluto are all examples, to different degrees, of the new humanity developing on Earth. In Roosevelt's attempt at wiping out human life, the inheritors of the Earth would have been not just robots, but the next step of human evolution as represented in Robot kind. Roosevelt was attempting to force the matter when it is clear that that evolution is happening anyway, naturally. Humanity going forward will be a mix of humans and robots, both children of men in their own way.

My treatise continues in Part Two, where I examine the Effects of War and Urasawa's commentary on the Iraq War and American Imperialism. I also look at The Role of Memory in Subjective Reality in Pluto.

The Run: The Conclusion of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto

In The Run I review multi-volume works over several weeks. This is the seventh of eight reviews of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, on Volumes 7 & 8. Click here for my other reviews in the series.

Pluto Volume 7 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2009/Viz Signature 2010

Volume 7 of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is the weakest volume in the series, but even a weak turnout from Urasawa is stronger than most comics. His and Takashi Nagasaki's writing is just as sharp, his art no less emotive and powerful. It's just that not much happens here, especially compared to the extraordinary heights achieved in Volume 6.

By now we know that Pluto is the robot Sahad, manipulated and fed with hatred by his creator, Abullah, and forced into the ultra-powerful body designed for climate manipulation, modified into a war machine. Abullah is seeking vengeance on those who he feels destroyed his family and his homeland. It is here in Volume 7 that we get our first clear look at Pluto, before only hinted, effectively obscured by shadow or clouds. Pluto is a gargantuan, black, armored behemoth, his external appearance reflecting the turmoil within his tortured consciousness.

Another robot whose appearance reflects their inner being is Epsilon, the pacifist sun-powered robot and (apparently) last of the greatest robots alive. Epsilon does not want to fight Pluto - he is not Epsilon's enemy. Epsilon wants nothing more than to be a foster dad to the youths he rescued from the ruins of Persia, but even Epsilon is not free from Abullah's intractable rage. Abullah contrives a kidnapping of one of Epsilon's charges, the traumatized Wassily who witnessed Bora at the end of the War. So Epsilon travels from his home in Australia to Scandanavia where Abullah holds Wassily captive, knowing that this may lead to his destruction.

Pluto Volume 8 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2009/Viz Signature 2010

The battle that ensues is as much between Epsilon and Pluto as it is Pluto with himself. Pluto has grown increasingly unstable, his soul blackened by the hate that has been forced on him by Abullah. But he cannot overcome his orders and the blackness of the emotions driving him, and openly Epsilon meets the fate.

But all is not lost. Helena, Gesicht's widow, delivered his memory chip to Professor Tenma, Atom's creator. Like Tenma's last great creation, Atom lies in a state of nondefinition, in a coma that can only be broken by the introduction of extreme emotion. Tenma had been reluctant to go forward but in the end gives in, introducing Gesicht's memory and personality into Atom just as Epsilon is destroyed, his essence crashing into Atom at his moment of reawakening. Atom is alive, but now he is fueled by sadness and hate. And as we get into Volume 8, he is the only one left that can stop Abullah and Pluto.

Before Gesicht died, he had completely figured out the series of events leading up to the Pluto murders. Just Prior to the War, Abullah - otherwise known as the rumored Goji - created a massive Earth-changing robot, Bora. In this regard, the WMD program that the United States accused Persia of having was quite real, even if it didn't go to fruition before or during the War. Abullah's attempts at creating WMDs met with repeated failure, so he commissioned Tenma to create the greatest robot on Earth. Except this robot could not be activated except by extreme emotion - the emotion provided by Abullah from his own memory when he died. Abullah, Goji, is that robot, made possible by his grief and his anger and his hate of all humanity.

Abullah was an Artificial Intelligence so advanced he lied to himself, keeping his own nature from himself. When his true nature is revealed to him by Tenma, he goes even further down the path of madness than before. Completely overcome with hatred for humanity, he sets out to destroy the world. As Bora, he will ignite the Yellowstone Caldera in the United States, destroying most of the world and wiping out almost all of humanity in the process. Bora's presence as a world-shattering bomb is revealed to the U.S. President by the only sympathetic U.S. character in the story, a weather forecast robot. The president goes to the AI that has been guiding his actions and secretly manipulating all of the events that have transpired, the trapped Dr. Roosevelt, the most advanced AI on the planet revealed by Brau 1589 much earlier in the series. The president is furious, how could Roosevelt keep such information from him? "You know, that weather forecast robot didn't need to feign such alarm. Sure, it will cause almost universal death. But we robots will survive."

With no less than the world at stake, it is Atom that must go out and face Pluto and somehow stop Bora. But that path is fraught. Upon awakening, Atom is mad, scrawling mathematical formulas on walls, formulas for an anti-proton bomb to shatter the world, the same anti-proton bomb at the heart of Bora. Escaping captivity, he catches sight of himself in a window: "You'd better not make me angry" he tells his own reflection. He is driven by hatred and sadness now, but there are other human elements within him. Just like the first time we met Atom, he comes across a snail on the sidewalk. And just like the first time, he gently puts the snail on a leaf and walks away. Gesicht, who is part of Atom now, wasn't just filled with hate, he had decency and deep love in him as well.

Before the inevitable conflict and sacrifices that must come, Atom visits two people, important to him and the story. He visits Brau who immediately recognizes the change in Atom. "You appear to have grown up. You have... a heart." Then he visits Helena, lost in the world, going through the motions of life, alone in her grief. What transpires is one of the story's most heartbreaking moments in a series predicated on loss and heartbreak. And just as heartbreaking, we finally see the genesis of Gesicht's hate. Robots cannot lie, yet Atom does here, not telling Helena of where Gesicht's hate came from, or the mystery of the missing time of her past, just of the love Gesicht had for her, the love that in the end transformed him. Because in the end, love is more powerful than hate.

In the end, the final battle becomes about overcoming nature, be it the darkness that exists in all of us or the programming and orders given to a tortured soul. Urasawa's art throughout this last volume is frankly astonishing. His depictions of human emotion and suspenseful character drama are matched by his world-shattering battle sequences, quiet moments of pain and loss and explosive action. The quiet of Volume 7 is the calm before the storm of Volume 8.

This is a story about the transformative power of loss. It is about the darkest aspects of our nature that makes us human. It is about the evils of war and the scars of war that echo down through the years. It is about the subjective reality of memory. It is a story of evolution and change and becoming human through trial and pain. And it is about the power of love to break the cycle of hate, the beauty within to overcome the darkness.

Next week, my final review in the series, a (lengthy & spoilery) overview of the whole story and all that Urasawa accomplished.

The Run: Naoki Urasawa's Pluto Volume 6

In The Run I review multi-volume works over several weeks. This is the sixth of eight reviews of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto. Click here for my other reviews in the series.

Pluto Volume 6 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2007/Viz Signature 2009

When Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki set out to adapt Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy they brilliantly made the robotic police inspector from The Greatest Robot on Earth the central character. It's Gesicht around which the story revolves. It is not just his investigation into the Pluto killings that drives the plot, but the hidden mystery of his own past that makes the emotional core of the story, especially in this volume. Urasawa continues to pull out a virtuoso performance of comic storytelling. Extraordinarily powerful and moving, this is a work of art that says volumes about the human condition, one of the finest accomplishments of the medium.

Pluto Volume 6 is a tightly plotted thriller with equal parts explosive action and riveting suspense-filled conversations. Gesicht's investigation takes him across the world, from what's left of Persia to interview the imprisoned King Darius XIV and Dr. Abullah (who lost his family and even his body in the War) to Amsterdam on the trail of the mysterious Sahad. Gesicht reaches a breakthrough in the case - he discovers the Artificial Intelligence behind Pluto and the secret of Pluto himself. We get far more answers than we could have hoped for, but the cost may be too high.  

Before the War, Dr. Abullah commissioned Dr. Tenma to create the most advanced AI in the world for Persia. But the AI was too advanced, trapped cycling through six billion personalities, unable to find its true identity. Every aspect of the AI was in balance, and the only thing that could awaken it was to introduce emotion: hatred, sadness, fear. The true fate of this robot is one of the great twists in the story, and it is soon revealed that the Greatest Robot left on Earth, the (second) most advanced AI, is not Gesicht or Epsilon, but the force behind Pluto, seeking revenge for the loss of his country and his family.

And then there is the tragedy of Pluto himself. The roots of his story comes back to the recurring theme of the field of flowers, the field that Pluto draws for Uran, that Darius draws in his cell. Before the war, Sahad, a brilliant botanist created the perfect flower, a tulip that could live forever, but at the cost of all life around it. Persia was going to bloom. But then War came, and all was lost.

And we come back around to the way hate poisons the soul, the scars of war reverberating down through the years, the power of loss, the lengths of revenge, the very bounds of death itself.  The humanity of the robots, the inhumanity of the humans. Visionary representations of love, hatred, sadness, and truly terrifying horror. What Urasawa accomplishes in this volume cements the work as a whole as one of the great masterpieces of the comic medium.

Gesicht tracks down Pluto at the same time that Professor Hoffman, his creator, is being held hostage. He makes a practical decision to save Hoffman, at the same time breaking himself free from the cycle of hatred and revenge. He was built as a police robot, but he is something more, now. The revelations of his own past, the truth behind Sahad and Abullah, it all adds up to a fever pitch of change. He rejects the orders of his superiors, violating the robot laws. Hate and loss evolved him, forgiveness and compassion made him more human. But the powers in play are too strong, the stakes are too high, and the events that transpire and how they come to pass are heartbreaking and unspeakably tragic in a story already rooted in profound sadness and tragedy.

He plans that vacation to Japan with Helena which he's been meaning to take with her since Volume 1. And when they finally get there, it once more signals the evolution of robot kind, this time born in tears.

The Run: Naoki Urasawa's Pluto Volume 5

In The Run I review multi-volume works over several weeks. This is the fifth of eight reviews of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto. Click here for my other reviews in the series.

Pluto Volume 5 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2007/Viz Signature 2009

At the beginning of Pluto Volume 5, Brau 1589 laughs at Gesicht, who he was expecting: "How does it feel to have killed a human?" Gesicht knows now what happened three years ago, or at least most of it. The memories are coming back to him, memories deleted by Europol without his permission, part of a massive cover-up. Gesicht knows that he was investigating a serial killer of child robots, that he cornered the subject, that he killed him in cold blood. That he committed murder outside of the bounds of normal police activity, in contradiction of the very code within him that should keep him from taking human life. And he now knows that the one thing that made it possible for him to kill, that one thing that is still giving him nightmares, is pure hatred. Deep within him, for reasons he is still coming to terms with, is pure, all encompassing hatred, a hatred that should not exist in robots, that scares Gesicht. A hatred shared by Pluto, by the power controlling Pluto, by the surviving victims of the War.

It is the role of hatred in the human experience that drives this volume. Professor Tenma created an Artificial Intelligence so advanced that it could only be woken by the introduction of a violent emotion to tip the balance. It may be hatred that is the key to robot evolution, hatred the key to what being human is. It is Adolph Haas' hatred of robots and of Gesicht for his role in his brother's death that has put Haas' own life and his family's life in danger. Epsilon is a pacifist who is trying to break the cycle of hate that began in the War in Persia - by refusing to fight, then by raising war orphans. Darius XIV hates the United States and the United Nations and the Bora Survey Group for their roles in turning his country to ash.

Hercules is not driven by hate, but he must fight the legacy of hate represented in Pluto, in the spirits of all those who died in the War. He has no choice but to confront Pluto, and he knows that he will likely be killed. But he goes forward anyway. If he cannot beat Pluto, he can definitely harm him and broadcast the results of the battle out to Epsilon, forced by his moral code to watch and to not interfere. These broadcasts during various characters' battles with Pluto are like telepathic transmissions of minds flashing through the end of their lives, the thoughts and emotions and memories that unintentionally come to the fore when confronted with inevitable mortality. Each time it happens is no less moving than the last and is a window into the characters' very soul. The battle that comes is the most violent and vividly presented yet, finally getting a clear picture of what Pluto is really capable of.

Uran is driven by sadness, but not just her own. Dealing with her own loss, her empathic powers send her across Tokyo, instinctively helping those in need. From lost kittens to lost wallets she comes across sadness so profound, sadness compounded by grief and despair, the sadness of Atom's creator Tenma. The revelation of Atom's origins in loss are the emotional core of the second half of the volume. The lengths that Tenma was willing to go, the questionable ethics, the universality of his intention. He created the most advanced robot in the world to be his son in place of the son he lost  - but despite Atom's advanced nature, there is no substitute for the real thing. Tenma resented Atom for being a simulacrum, a facsimile he created, a pale shade, and he rejected him so completely, so violently - he sold him, like an object, not like the sentient being he was. And now Atom is gone and Tenma's own abilities as one of the most brilliant scientists alive are not enough to bring him back. Just like he failed to bring back his son, failing Atom in death like how he failed him in life.

Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki's scripting continues to leave you breathless, as does Urasawa's astonishing art. From a robot compulsively washing its hands, unable to clean the metaphorical blood on them, to a quiet dinner packed with subtext, the quiet moments of pain and loss and grief which fill the book are seismic.

And amongst all the pain and sadness there is hope, bleeding in around the edges. But things are darkest before the dawn and under gathering storm clouds, we are still far from sunlight.

The Run: Naoki Urasawa's Pluto Volume 4

In The Run I review multi-volume works over several weeks. This is the fourth of eight reviews of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto. Click here for my other reviews in the series.

Pluto Volume 4 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2006/Viz Signature 2009

Naoki Urasawa's Pluto Volume 4 is an intense emotional roller coaster that starts out with the drama and the action dialed to eleven and never lets up.

The head of the Ministry of Science in Japan, Professor Ochanomizu is under police protection. He is one of the last surviving members of the Bora Survey Group, and a prime target of the Pluto Killer. He doesn't believe protection is needed, that the police are overreacting. While sitting in a park, he discovers a discarded dog-bot, badly damaged. The heartbreaking scenes that follow offer a window into Ochanomizu - a widower and grandfather, he is kind to robots, going out of his way to help those in need. Then, Ochanomizu gets a visitor, the owner of the dog-bot, but things aren't as they seem.

The scenes that follow are pure moments of riveting suspense that drive the story forward into amazing, nonstop action-packed set pieces. Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki's scripting and Urasawa's art evoke an astonishing economy of storytelling, propelling the plot forward with an emotion and tension that are rarely seen in comics of any stripe. The confrontations that occur right out the gate, urgently staged, are frightening and moving and will have far-reaching consequences for all of our characters going forward. And this is just in the first few chapters.

Not letting up, we get visions - fever dreams of loss and fear. Nearly incapacitated by the events that occur, Inspector Gesicht finds himself with far more on his plate than just the rising body count. Adolph Haas, seeking revenge, has been stalking him - but the robot hate group that Haas belongs to has other plans for Gesicht. They want him alive to destroy him in the public arena, and they are willing to take out Haas to maintain their nefarious plans. Haas and Gesicht's fates are intertwined far more than either could have ever predicted, all the way to the top of a conspiracy spearheaded by the imprisoned Persian monarch Darius XIV.

And then there's Tenma, Ochanomizu's predecessor and at the Ministry of Science and the creator of one of the most powerful robots in the world, Atom. Seven years ago, the late Professor Newton-Howard (creator of Epsilon's photon energy, murdered at the hands of the Pluto Killer), Professor Hoffman (the inventor of Gesicht's zeronium, himself now on the run form the Pluto Killer), and Tenma (the preeminent expert in artificial intelligence) met at the Kimberly Conference. Hoffman and Newton-Howard wanted to pool their resources with Tenma to create a robot that could potentially save the world from itself. But Tenma rejected them - to make the perfect robot, the perfect AI, would be to create a being capable of suffering, of hatred, and the capacity for mistakes. "Stop trying to make robots more like humans, or something terrible may happen..." Prophetic words or the voice of experience? And could Tenma's reluctance stop the evolution in robots that seems to be happening regardless? "You don't understand. Frustration and failure, seething hatred... That is what fosters Artificial Intelligence." And is that what fosters human intelligence, too? Is the key to humanity pain?

The tragedies and revelations come fast and hard. This is an extraordinary character drama wrapped in one of the most intense science fiction thrillers ever produced. Urasawa delivers an astonishing work of graphic fiction, equally at home in hyper dense future cityscapes, world-shaking sci-fi action set-pieces, quiet conversations dripping with suspense, and the mentally tumultuous moments of loss and despair that define the human experience.

The Run: Naoki Urasawa's Pluto Volume 3

In The Run I review multi-volume works over several weeks. This is the third of eight reviews of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto. Click here for my other reviews in the series.

Pluto Volume 3 Written & Produced by
Naoki Urasawa & Takashi Nagasaki
Illustrated by Naoki Urasawa
Translated by Jared Cook & Frederick Schodt
Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth
 Created, Written & Illustrated by Osamu Tezuka
Shogakukan 2006/Viz Signature 2009

"Robots are servants, robots are slaves, death to robots!"

Adolph Haas hates robots. His father was replaced by robots in the factory he worked in, then crawled into a bottle and jumped off a roof when Haas was still a child. Haas and his brother grew up, his brother becoming a criminal, Haas getting a respectable job, a family, a robot maid. He belongs to KR, a far right anti-robot group, all clandestine meetings and hoods like the KKK they were modeled on. KR's membership is secret, but they have influential people from all strata of society in their ranks. They are unified by hate. This is more than just a harmless social club, but a terrorist group. A robot judge has died under mysterious circumstances, an explosion. KR is pleased by this.

Adolph Haas's brother died three years ago, killed by the police. His brother's crimes are so ugly and unspeakable that even Adolph thinks he probably had it coming. But he was still his brother. Only now is Haas able to claim the body, and a new autopsy shows that only one weapon could have killed him, a weapon that can only be wielded by a robot, only one robot on Europol... But robots can't kill humans, and there is no record of a shooting three years ago. Haas sees this as his opportunity for revenge against the robot that killed his brother. KR sees this as an opportunity to set the robots rights movement back by decades. Haas finds himself in a web of conspiracy and vengeance, inextricably linked to one of the most powerful robots alive, none other than Inspector Gesicht.

"I couldn't tell if he was robot or human..."

Professor Abullah arrives in Tokyo, a brilliant scientist and ambassador of the provisional Persian government at the World Science Peace Conference. He was one of the last people to see Junichiro Tasaki, the formulator of the robot laws, alive. He may not be a suspect as the Pluto Killer, but Abullah is hiding dark secrets of his own. He was there during the 39th Central Asian War, a witness to the destruction wrought on his homeland, and his reasons for being in Japan are far from peaceful.

"How can a robot with your powers refuse to fight?"

Epsilon is the last of the most powerful robots in the world, and the only one who didn't fight during the War. He felt it was unjust, but his stand cost him - where the other robots were treated as war heroes, he was leveled with abuse and derision. But he believes in peace and nonviolence. After the War, he took in War orphans who were physically and psychologically effected by the War. One boy saw something horrifying in the desert during the darkest days of the conflict, a sight still effecting him. He can only say one word about it. "Bora."

Epsilon appears just in time to stop Hercules from confronting the Pluto Killer, or at least his preparations to. Hercules can't seriously expect to defeat the Pluto Killer who so easily dispatched Hercules' fighting equal, Brando. Even Epsilon, superpowered by photon energy, superpowered even by Hercules' standards, is scared. But violence cannot be the answer. The War has left scars on all of them, and they "must sever this connection... to the cycle of Hate."

"You sensed they were afraid?"

We first saw Uran at the end of Volume 2, a precocious girl of Atom's apparent age, perhaps younger. Some lions and tigers had escaped the zoo and were surrounding a small child. The police were going to shoot the animals, and Uran stepped in, brought the cats to her and calmed the whole situation.

At the beginning of Volume 3, the police are incredulous. Uran is a robot, super advanced like Atom. She sensed the animals' fear, from kilometers away. Atom, her brother, picks her up, and even he is stunned by her ability. She can't explain what it is that she feels, she just does. She's a powerful empath, probably the only one in existence, another example of the changing face of robot kind.

This ability draws her to a troubled homeless man, a robot suffering in pain and grief. He is haunted by the things he saw in the War, unable to cope with life after War. Uran, in her childlike innocence wants only to help him. Without Atom's knowledge she visits the man, brings him food and clothes, and emotional support. Inspired by something within himself that he cannot identify, he draws on a wall, an interpretive, abstract image. Robots aren't supposed to be capable of abstraction, yet here on this wall - like an ancient cave painting heralding something more from a species on the verge of ascendance - is an image of profound pain and beauty.

He doesn't know his name or how he got there or why these images haunt him. Then on one visit, Uran witnesses from this robot what can only be described as a miracle. But of course things aren't as they seem, and what happens next blows the story wide open with simple, shocking and sudden revelations about the forces at work behind the War, the Pluto murders and the very future of robotics.

"I wonder what it really means to die?"

The mysteries weaving throughout the series come into unexpected sharp focus in Volume 3. The series' multiple identity as not just a mystery and international thriller, but surprisingly scary work of horror also come to the fore. There is plenty to fear, from the creepy abilities of one subtly monstrous robot at the beck and call of a mysterious foe, to grand shifting horrors beyond human and even robot understanding, through to the menace presented by base human hate. Things are coming into focus at the same time the lines blur even more, the lines between guilt and innocence, beauty and horror, war and peace. 

And we are given moments of beauty wrapped in pain, and startling revelations that ask more questions than they answer. The future is here, but things could not be more uncertain. Naoki Urasawa continues to deliver a unique and moving work, with detailed and powerful art, and characters and a vision of the future that stays with you long after you put it down.