Haunting Pluto
This is something I wrote on deadline, for a class on comic books. As it was written very quickly, somewhat intentionally overlong, and in a style that at least tries to pay lip service to the idea of academic standards while actually just rambling on however it likes, it may or may not fit in perfectly with the tone here. It's about Pluto, a manga I've been intending to discuss for quite some time. Later this week or next I'll probably make another post about Pluto, delving into a specific idea I found interesting; consider this post background and introduction for that one, and feel free to just skim through and look at the pretty links if you want.
Pretty much everything I say here has the potential to be a spoiler, at least for the first few chapters, so just go read the darn thing first, and then ignore my essay because you've read it for yourself. You'll be better off that way.
Pluto is a manga written and drawn since 2003 by Naoki Urasawa. It is not yet released in the United States, but fan translations, or scanslations, are available on the internet. Urasawa, who has been producing manga since 1983, has received some of the field of manga's most sought-after awards, twice including the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Achievement Award: first in 1999 for Monster and then again in 2005 for Pluto. This is highly appropriate, as Pluto is an adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu story "The World's Strongest Robot". Tetsuwan Atomu translates roughly as "Ambassador Atom" and was renamed when it was adapted as an anime and, later, exported to the West as Astro Boy.
Astro Boy is the grandfather of all robot anime, the first example of Japan's pop-cultural obsession with robots, and its influence can be felt in everything from the Mega Man series of video games (and by extension dystopian posthuman rock operators The Protomen) to everything else that uses robots as a primary genre element to, according to historian Helen McCarthy, Japan's enthusiasm in the face of technological advances and industrial shifts in their society. (Sabin, 227) Astro Boy taught us that a robot can be a hero, and Japan, at least, has never forgotten that.
Nerds like me are probably vaguely familiar with Astro Boy from Adult Swim or Cartoon Network as a seemingly primitively drawn, childish robot blasting about on boot-jets to save the world, and might wonder at the fact that a single storyline from this ancient robot anime has been unearthed and given new life across an entire manga series that has lasted for five years and 52 issues, seeming only now to be drawing near a conclusion. However, while Pluto is in fact a decompressed and deepened retelling of the story, the depth of Osamu Tezuka's storytelling and the questions posed by the original remain completely compelling and valid: in a world populated as much by robots as by humans, why do humans create robots for the primary purpose of battling and defeating other robots? Given the capacity to create life, why must we turn our creations towards destruction?
In a world where remote-controlled robots armed with machine-guns, shotguns and grenade launchers are patrolling alongside soldiers in Iraq, a world where the CIA used an unmanned aerial vehicle armed with hellfire missiles to eliminate a carload of terrorists in someone else's country, these questions seem almost to take on some kind of real-world importance. Certainly, we don't live in a world with artificial intelligence and flying robot children, but as unmanned weapon systems become more autonomous despite international efforts to keep a human being in the loop this debate may take on a real world context. For now, though, bring on the arm guns and boot-jets, the combat shells and electromagnetic tornadoes: Pluto is here.
Pluto does not begin as an Astro Boy story; its version of the character, named Atom, does not appear at all until the 7th act, and remains, at least as of May 2008, a secondary character, albeit a central one. The main character of Pluto was a minor character in the original story: a German police detective robot named Gesicht (meaning 'Face') who finds himself investigating a series of murders. (He's pictured above, and throughout. Seriously. Go read this.) The victims are split into two groups, one of humans who were involved in a four-year old military investigation during a war in Persia and one of robots who were instrumental in ending that war, robots who are classified as weapons of mass destruction. These are the most powerful robots in the world, and Gesicht is one of them. All the crime scenes have two things in common: makeshift horns placed by the head of the body and a complete lack of physical evidence left behind by the attacker. This leads Europol, the agency for which Gesicht works, to believe that the crimes may have been committed by a robot, making it a case of even more historic and political importance.
The story that proceeds to unfold takes place across three continents and ten years of backstory, through an intriguingly realized world where robots and humans have begun to find ways to coexist, with a robot bill of rights having been signed into law and robots finding service in all branches of society. It is the art that really sells this idea--there are no footnotes ala Shirow's Ghost in the Shell here, and no narration to guide us through. The world is not incredibly well developed: it is a place expressed in a cartoony style, full of simple, easily read technologies; a place where society has changed less than its trappings have, and a fairly traditional science fiction future--which is actually a bonus, because this iconic representation of a world allows us to invest more fully in the emotions and philosophies of the characters, and appreciate their social struggles better: the transparency of the world allows us to more easily inhabit it.
Emotion is at the core of what makes Pluto function, and it is the ability of this manga to nearly wrench tears from my manly eyes of flint that compels me to value it so highly. The saga of Norse #2 learning to play the piano is at first glance a highly clichéd one, and at second glance, no individual element of it seems like high genius: he is a cartoonily drawn robot, face perpetually distant and sad, serving as the butler to a cranky old composer in a Scottish castle, trying to overcome his master's prejudice in order to escape his memories of war. And yet, as I read the story, I cannot help but blink back tears. It is not the writing alone that does this: I can see its claws coming for my heartstrings, and usually this would irritate me and pull me out of the story, but whenever the plot becomes too blatant in seeking to force me into a reaction, the art comes through with such brilliance that I cannot help but be drawn back in; whenever I grow scornful of the sad robot's unchanging face the hollowness of his words makes me forgive him. Every time I read the pages, my vision blurs--and I am no easy mark for such cons.
Graphically, Urasawa conveys emotion using every trick in the book, from facial expression to varying background to repeating the face of a robot policeman's expressionless wife until we somehow see it as sad. As the story continues, and intensifies, his robot protagonists begin to swap memories and send pulses of data in their death throes. They exchange parts of their minds and souls. These events are handled with transcendental skill, using abstract and impressionistic effects to convey the experience not only of love, or sadness, or murderous hatred, but of encountering someone else's experience of these things and recognizing it within oneself. Scott McCloud brings up the possibility of these effects in his work Understanding Comics, but Pluto makes its emotional sigils mind-searingly real, and, further, has the characters aware of their existence, meaning and extraordinary potency. I am not ashamed of the fact that I feel things when I read this book: this is a book that can make, and has made, (admittedly child-like and fictional) robots cry.
In terms of overall structure, this is a thriller, slow-building and multi-layered, with each issue revealing a little more of the puzzle and moving the protagonists, and therefore the reader, a little closer to the solution,. While I speak of puzzles, and the complexity of the backstory is certainly puzzling at times, this is a thriller which draws inspiration from hardboiled stories and is as much about how the characters solve the case as it is about solving the case itself. We are here to suffer with them and sympathize with them and cheer them towards hopeful victory rather than to attempt to solve the case before they do. Despite having a detective as a protagonist, this is a story about robots fighting each other, and sometimes that sensibility will win out, but the pacing and plot structure are pure hard-boiled detective yarn the entire way, except with more heart.
Looking more closely at individual chapters, nearly all of them end on or just after a revelation of some kind, major or minor, and these revelations are given large splash panels to emphasize their importance. Frequently, these revelations are artistically moving in addition to narratively important, and they serve as set-pieces that force the reader to react. The other panels vary both by size and word count, with the word count per panel sharply decreasing in times of tension and stress, leading to the feeling of rushing through pages, ever closer to that onrushing revelation or development at the end of the chapter. Sometimes, after an explosive chapter like this, the storytelling will drop back into a more placid, environmental mode, but it comes back faster and hits harder every time, building and building without becoming too pressurized to believe through the magic of the manga storytelling style done well: moments and places are invested with such a sense of timeliness and timelessness that the emotion invested in them fills the page with self-evident truth.
Some of the story's best moments take place in these respites between the explosions, revelations and sorrows: sometimes, I am perfectly content to watch Atom pick up a snail or eat ice cream. The poignancy of these moments lends depth and meaning to the rest of the work; the joy in small things makes the enormous scale of the heartbreak even more heartbreaking. The emotional investment makes the action sequences compelling on a level seldom seen in western comics, and the overall quality of the storytelling is nearly impossible to beat.
Pluto is a masterpiece of comic-style storytelling, with art that perfectly suits its purpose, and it addresses one of the genre concepts I most adore, albeit in more complex and less direct ways than a superhero comic might. It is not high literature, or the answer to life the universe and everything, but it knows exactly what it is and embodies that concept to the fullest possible extent. Among the manga I have read it is peerless.
Pretty much everything I say here has the potential to be a spoiler, at least for the first few chapters, so just go read the darn thing first, and then ignore my essay because you've read it for yourself. You'll be better off that way.
TEARS AND ZERONIUM ROUNDS:
NAOKI URASAWA'S PLUTO
NAOKI URASAWA'S PLUTO
Pluto is a manga written and drawn since 2003 by Naoki Urasawa. It is not yet released in the United States, but fan translations, or scanslations, are available on the internet. Urasawa, who has been producing manga since 1983, has received some of the field of manga's most sought-after awards, twice including the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Achievement Award: first in 1999 for Monster and then again in 2005 for Pluto. This is highly appropriate, as Pluto is an adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu story "The World's Strongest Robot". Tetsuwan Atomu translates roughly as "Ambassador Atom" and was renamed when it was adapted as an anime and, later, exported to the West as Astro Boy.
Astro Boy is the grandfather of all robot anime, the first example of Japan's pop-cultural obsession with robots, and its influence can be felt in everything from the Mega Man series of video games (and by extension dystopian posthuman rock operators The Protomen) to everything else that uses robots as a primary genre element to, according to historian Helen McCarthy, Japan's enthusiasm in the face of technological advances and industrial shifts in their society. (Sabin, 227) Astro Boy taught us that a robot can be a hero, and Japan, at least, has never forgotten that.
Nerds like me are probably vaguely familiar with Astro Boy from Adult Swim or Cartoon Network as a seemingly primitively drawn, childish robot blasting about on boot-jets to save the world, and might wonder at the fact that a single storyline from this ancient robot anime has been unearthed and given new life across an entire manga series that has lasted for five years and 52 issues, seeming only now to be drawing near a conclusion. However, while Pluto is in fact a decompressed and deepened retelling of the story, the depth of Osamu Tezuka's storytelling and the questions posed by the original remain completely compelling and valid: in a world populated as much by robots as by humans, why do humans create robots for the primary purpose of battling and defeating other robots? Given the capacity to create life, why must we turn our creations towards destruction?
In a world where remote-controlled robots armed with machine-guns, shotguns and grenade launchers are patrolling alongside soldiers in Iraq, a world where the CIA used an unmanned aerial vehicle armed with hellfire missiles to eliminate a carload of terrorists in someone else's country, these questions seem almost to take on some kind of real-world importance. Certainly, we don't live in a world with artificial intelligence and flying robot children, but as unmanned weapon systems become more autonomous despite international efforts to keep a human being in the loop this debate may take on a real world context. For now, though, bring on the arm guns and boot-jets, the combat shells and electromagnetic tornadoes: Pluto is here.
Pluto does not begin as an Astro Boy story; its version of the character, named Atom, does not appear at all until the 7th act, and remains, at least as of May 2008, a secondary character, albeit a central one. The main character of Pluto was a minor character in the original story: a German police detective robot named Gesicht (meaning 'Face') who finds himself investigating a series of murders. (He's pictured above, and throughout. Seriously. Go read this.) The victims are split into two groups, one of humans who were involved in a four-year old military investigation during a war in Persia and one of robots who were instrumental in ending that war, robots who are classified as weapons of mass destruction. These are the most powerful robots in the world, and Gesicht is one of them. All the crime scenes have two things in common: makeshift horns placed by the head of the body and a complete lack of physical evidence left behind by the attacker. This leads Europol, the agency for which Gesicht works, to believe that the crimes may have been committed by a robot, making it a case of even more historic and political importance.
The story that proceeds to unfold takes place across three continents and ten years of backstory, through an intriguingly realized world where robots and humans have begun to find ways to coexist, with a robot bill of rights having been signed into law and robots finding service in all branches of society. It is the art that really sells this idea--there are no footnotes ala Shirow's Ghost in the Shell here, and no narration to guide us through. The world is not incredibly well developed: it is a place expressed in a cartoony style, full of simple, easily read technologies; a place where society has changed less than its trappings have, and a fairly traditional science fiction future--which is actually a bonus, because this iconic representation of a world allows us to invest more fully in the emotions and philosophies of the characters, and appreciate their social struggles better: the transparency of the world allows us to more easily inhabit it.
Emotion is at the core of what makes Pluto function, and it is the ability of this manga to nearly wrench tears from my manly eyes of flint that compels me to value it so highly. The saga of Norse #2 learning to play the piano is at first glance a highly clichéd one, and at second glance, no individual element of it seems like high genius: he is a cartoonily drawn robot, face perpetually distant and sad, serving as the butler to a cranky old composer in a Scottish castle, trying to overcome his master's prejudice in order to escape his memories of war. And yet, as I read the story, I cannot help but blink back tears. It is not the writing alone that does this: I can see its claws coming for my heartstrings, and usually this would irritate me and pull me out of the story, but whenever the plot becomes too blatant in seeking to force me into a reaction, the art comes through with such brilliance that I cannot help but be drawn back in; whenever I grow scornful of the sad robot's unchanging face the hollowness of his words makes me forgive him. Every time I read the pages, my vision blurs--and I am no easy mark for such cons.
Graphically, Urasawa conveys emotion using every trick in the book, from facial expression to varying background to repeating the face of a robot policeman's expressionless wife until we somehow see it as sad. As the story continues, and intensifies, his robot protagonists begin to swap memories and send pulses of data in their death throes. They exchange parts of their minds and souls. These events are handled with transcendental skill, using abstract and impressionistic effects to convey the experience not only of love, or sadness, or murderous hatred, but of encountering someone else's experience of these things and recognizing it within oneself. Scott McCloud brings up the possibility of these effects in his work Understanding Comics, but Pluto makes its emotional sigils mind-searingly real, and, further, has the characters aware of their existence, meaning and extraordinary potency. I am not ashamed of the fact that I feel things when I read this book: this is a book that can make, and has made, (admittedly child-like and fictional) robots cry.
In terms of overall structure, this is a thriller, slow-building and multi-layered, with each issue revealing a little more of the puzzle and moving the protagonists, and therefore the reader, a little closer to the solution,. While I speak of puzzles, and the complexity of the backstory is certainly puzzling at times, this is a thriller which draws inspiration from hardboiled stories and is as much about how the characters solve the case as it is about solving the case itself. We are here to suffer with them and sympathize with them and cheer them towards hopeful victory rather than to attempt to solve the case before they do. Despite having a detective as a protagonist, this is a story about robots fighting each other, and sometimes that sensibility will win out, but the pacing and plot structure are pure hard-boiled detective yarn the entire way, except with more heart.
Looking more closely at individual chapters, nearly all of them end on or just after a revelation of some kind, major or minor, and these revelations are given large splash panels to emphasize their importance. Frequently, these revelations are artistically moving in addition to narratively important, and they serve as set-pieces that force the reader to react. The other panels vary both by size and word count, with the word count per panel sharply decreasing in times of tension and stress, leading to the feeling of rushing through pages, ever closer to that onrushing revelation or development at the end of the chapter. Sometimes, after an explosive chapter like this, the storytelling will drop back into a more placid, environmental mode, but it comes back faster and hits harder every time, building and building without becoming too pressurized to believe through the magic of the manga storytelling style done well: moments and places are invested with such a sense of timeliness and timelessness that the emotion invested in them fills the page with self-evident truth.
Some of the story's best moments take place in these respites between the explosions, revelations and sorrows: sometimes, I am perfectly content to watch Atom pick up a snail or eat ice cream. The poignancy of these moments lends depth and meaning to the rest of the work; the joy in small things makes the enormous scale of the heartbreak even more heartbreaking. The emotional investment makes the action sequences compelling on a level seldom seen in western comics, and the overall quality of the storytelling is nearly impossible to beat.
Pluto is a masterpiece of comic-style storytelling, with art that perfectly suits its purpose, and it addresses one of the genre concepts I most adore, albeit in more complex and less direct ways than a superhero comic might. It is not high literature, or the answer to life the universe and everything, but it knows exactly what it is and embodies that concept to the fullest possible extent. Among the manga I have read it is peerless.
References:
Roger Sabin, COMICS, COMIX & GRAPHIC NOVELS: A HISTORY OF COMIC ART,
Scott McCloud, UNDERSTANDING COMICS: THE INVISIBLE ART,
Paul Gravett, GRAPHIC NOVELS: Everything You Need To Know,
The backmatter to volume 1 of the collected version of Pluto, as yet published only in
Author Unknown, “Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa”, Tezuka in English Database. 2006. Accessed 2008. Permanent Link: http://tezukainenglish.com/?q=node/147
Labels: boring, essay, long, manga, pluto, robots are going to
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