Three and a half stars.

The author of this series, Naoki Urasawa, created 20th Century Boys, one of the classics despite how convoluted it became by the end. In addition he also made Monster, for which he’s likely more acclaimed, but to be honest I have twice failed to get through the opening chapters of that series; along with its expository dialogue, Urasawa’s view of the world, as depicted through his narrative choices, irks me.

There’s a moment in 20th Century Boys in which a spunky teen girl stops a murderous gang war by scolding the participants. This happens in an otherwise very serious narrative. And the mindset behind such a narrative choice, which I could call a pollyanna perspective, pops up relatively often in his stories: people who hate others for reasonable motives suddenly flip and forgive the culprits to the extent of crying for them. Bad people tend to be forgiven even though they caused the deaths of numerous innocents. The good guys should also never kill anybody, because killing is bad, although keeping those people alive causes further deaths in the future.

His series Monster starts with what’s supposed to be a shocking moment of moral corruption or whatever: a Turkish immigrant laborer in Germany has his surgery delayed because the mayor comes in with an injury. The author treats this as an abhorrent development, particularly because the first guy was a stereotypically-depicted downtrodden person. In a heavy-handed manner, I was supposed to feel outrage at this injustice. Sorry, if I’m awaiting surgery for any of my many problems, and suddenly Elon Musk gets wheeled in first because he needs emergency surgery, I would understand even if I would curse at the heavens. Elon Musk’s decisions affect far more people than I do, and so would a mayor’s than a random laborer’s.

Anyway, this series I’m reviewing is a homage to one of the most memorable arcs (apparently) of Osamu Tezuka’s legendary Astro Boy, from back in the sixties. It has nothing to do with Pluto the planet; it refers instead to the Roman god of mortality. The story takes place in an optimistic future in which most societies have become super advanced and have created robot servants. Some of those robots, particularly the cutting-edge ones, could easily be confused for humans. Our protagonist, one of those advanced robots, works as an investigator for Europol. He faces a string of murders in which the victims are both humans and robots, and a robot may be responsible. Due to the laws of robotics, lifted straight from Isaac Asimov, that’s not supposed to happen.

What follows is a thriller that could have been far more compelling. Urasawa is a masterful plotter, but often as subtle as a jackhammer, and he abuses moments in which he’s about to reveal something important only to leave us in a cliffhanger. I don’t recall any other manga author that has been making thrillers with that sort of Western flavor, and I’m grateful, because to me it feels cheap.

The story is interesting, has good stakes and intriguing characters, but for me it fails mainly in the execution and the worldbuilding. Regarding the execution, apart from the points mentioned before, it goes for sentimentality that doesn’t hit the right notes as far as my black heart is concerned, and the worldbuilding in regards to how those robots are built and what they’re capable of doing sounds more like magic than technology. A couple of moments grasped at intriguing psychological insights regarding how both robots and humans are puppets; in the case of humans, because we’re manipulated and compelled to act based on emotions that are mostly out of our control. There were also interesting parallels with early 2000s history: alternate versions of the US and Iraq play a role in the narrative, and plenty of the characters were involved in an alternate version of the war between both nations, including the notion that this alternate Iraq may have developed weapons of mass destruction.

A high-quality anime adaptation is in the works, to be released on the Netflix platform. Here’s the trailer: