Since I’ve mentioned Yen Press a few times in the last months (in reference to K-On and Kobato, as well as some upcoming titles), I figured I should give a little background on them.
Yen Press is a subset of Hachette Book Group USA, a company owned by Hachette Livre (a French company, so it’s not surprising that they’ve tackled such a wide range of manga titles--there's a lot more manga translated into French than there is into English, and titles tend to come out faster over there, too. The entire run of Yugioh was out in France when Shonen Jump was just getting into the start of the card game). Yen Press is also one of the newest of newcomers (that are still around) to the manga translation world: it was founded in 2006.
Yen Press took a page out of Del Rey Manga’s book and published translation notes with their volumes. They also tend to include honorifics; there are some exceptions, such as Black Butler, where they’ve eschewed honorifics because they would feel out of place to an English-reading audience (since that series is set in Victorian London). Unlike Del Rey, however, Yen Press doesn’t usually include a few translated or untranslated pages of the next volume at the end of a manga; they default more to a ‘teaser,’ similar to Tokyopop’s model. The difference is that Yen Press tends to do a full page teaser complete with summary and a panel from the coming volume, while Tokyopop typically only does a summary.
Yen Press is also what I would consider the most otaku of manga translators--they pretty much dived in assuming that their predecessors (Del Rey, Viz, Tokyopop, and some smaller companies like CMX or DrMaster) had sufficiently introduced manga and basic Japanese culture to the mainstream that they could dispense with Anglicizing their titles. They’ve also been the main introducer of manhwa, or Korean manga, to America (like Cynical Orange and Hissing); and they’re also publishing a few original English titles, like the Maximum Ride series and the Twilight graphic novel. So while they may not be the best place to start if you’re unfamiliar with manga, once you get the hang of it I highly recommend them!
April 14, 2011
March 31, 2011
K-On, by Kakifly
K-On is a slice-of-life comedy series set in modern Japan, about four girls who join the pop music club at their school to keep it from being disbanded. Like Azumanga Daioh or Hidamari Sketch, it’s in a four panel comic format.
Ritsu, drummer and club president, is the one who sets everything in motion to ensure the club won’t be disbanded before she can join: she literally rips up her friend Mio’s application to the choir club and drags her into joining the pop music club as a bassist instead. Tsumugi, keyboardist and super-rich girl, joins them at the same time; but that leaves one space still blank. Enter Yui, who kind of gets sucked into the club. Yui doesn’t know how to play an instrument (other than the cymbals), so part of the club’s activities involve teaching her how to play the guitar.
The club continues to be plagued by troubles, however. The president isn’t really on the ball about things like turning in the official application, or engaging in visible activities; and they acquire a faculty sponsor by blackmailing a teacher into doing it: Sawako was a former member of the pop music club, back when it was a death metal band. Because she now presents herself as a mild-mannered woman, she doesn’t want her past to get out (plus, she likes having a place in the school where she can drop the act and show off her ability to thresh and play the guitar with her teeth. Seriously, she really does that). Plus, Yui has a bad habit of slacking off when studying for tests, so she’s often teetering on the edge of being kicked out of the club.
K-On is translated by Yen Press. It ran from 2007 to 2010 and wrapped up with 4 volumes, only 2 of which are currently translated. There’s also an anime series that ran for 13 episodes in 2009, which will be brought over in April by Bandai in with subtitles and a dub (maybe; the product details for the DVD are conflicting).
Ritsu, drummer and club president, is the one who sets everything in motion to ensure the club won’t be disbanded before she can join: she literally rips up her friend Mio’s application to the choir club and drags her into joining the pop music club as a bassist instead. Tsumugi, keyboardist and super-rich girl, joins them at the same time; but that leaves one space still blank. Enter Yui, who kind of gets sucked into the club. Yui doesn’t know how to play an instrument (other than the cymbals), so part of the club’s activities involve teaching her how to play the guitar.
The club continues to be plagued by troubles, however. The president isn’t really on the ball about things like turning in the official application, or engaging in visible activities; and they acquire a faculty sponsor by blackmailing a teacher into doing it: Sawako was a former member of the pop music club, back when it was a death metal band. Because she now presents herself as a mild-mannered woman, she doesn’t want her past to get out (plus, she likes having a place in the school where she can drop the act and show off her ability to thresh and play the guitar with her teeth. Seriously, she really does that). Plus, Yui has a bad habit of slacking off when studying for tests, so she’s often teetering on the edge of being kicked out of the club.
K-On is translated by Yen Press. It ran from 2007 to 2010 and wrapped up with 4 volumes, only 2 of which are currently translated. There’s also an anime series that ran for 13 episodes in 2009, which will be brought over in April by Bandai in with subtitles and a dub (maybe; the product details for the DVD are conflicting).
March 21, 2011
The Sky Crawlers
The Sky Crawlers is a 2008 anime movie, based off a book within a series of novels by Hiroshi Mori. It's a war movie, although in this case it's set in an alternate history, and the "war" is between two martial corporations. It's the story of a group of fighter pilots.
Although the world is (seemingly) at peace, the argument goes that people are unused to a world without wartime aggression and casualties, so corporations contract soldiers and fighter pilots to engage in real battle with one another to provide the necessary headlines. The companies have specific people who do this: the "Kildren," a group of genetically engineered young adults who neither age nor die--at least not of natural causes. Because they only die if killed, like in battle, it's the perfect solution to the companies' need to fill their pilots and tanks.
The main character of The Sky Crawlers is Yūichi Kannami, an ace pilot of the Rostock Corporation who transfers to a small rural base at the start of the movie. He works with three other pilots, and with Suito Kusanagi, the girl in charge of the base, who also flies when a pilot is injured/killed or when a plane is damaged. All the pilots and the commander are Kildren; the only people on the base who are not are the mechanics. In fact, there is only one pilot in the whole war who is an adult: The Teacher, a former Rostock pilot who joined its rivals. He is the main enemy of the Kannami and his fellow pilots, the one no one else has been able to beat. While the wider story involves plans of a siege attack on the rival corporation and the discovery of secrets surrounding the Kildren, it's really the battles with the Teacher that absorb Kannami, and all the pilots', attention. For a movie full of aerial dogfights, it's surprisingly slow.
An interesting aspect of the film is that all the characters typically speak Japanese in their daily lives; but when they're in the cockpit of their planes and flying, they speak in English. It raises some neat questions about the training the Rostock Corp. provides.
The film was produced by I.G. Production and the soundtrack was done by Kenji Kawai, so it has a similar feel to the Ghost in the Shell series (which was done by the same people). It was distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures, without an English dub. There is also a game for the Wii, Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, which has been translated into English; and a manga and the aforementioned novel series, which have not.
Although the world is (seemingly) at peace, the argument goes that people are unused to a world without wartime aggression and casualties, so corporations contract soldiers and fighter pilots to engage in real battle with one another to provide the necessary headlines. The companies have specific people who do this: the "Kildren," a group of genetically engineered young adults who neither age nor die--at least not of natural causes. Because they only die if killed, like in battle, it's the perfect solution to the companies' need to fill their pilots and tanks.
The main character of The Sky Crawlers is Yūichi Kannami, an ace pilot of the Rostock Corporation who transfers to a small rural base at the start of the movie. He works with three other pilots, and with Suito Kusanagi, the girl in charge of the base, who also flies when a pilot is injured/killed or when a plane is damaged. All the pilots and the commander are Kildren; the only people on the base who are not are the mechanics. In fact, there is only one pilot in the whole war who is an adult: The Teacher, a former Rostock pilot who joined its rivals. He is the main enemy of the Kannami and his fellow pilots, the one no one else has been able to beat. While the wider story involves plans of a siege attack on the rival corporation and the discovery of secrets surrounding the Kildren, it's really the battles with the Teacher that absorb Kannami, and all the pilots', attention. For a movie full of aerial dogfights, it's surprisingly slow.
An interesting aspect of the film is that all the characters typically speak Japanese in their daily lives; but when they're in the cockpit of their planes and flying, they speak in English. It raises some neat questions about the training the Rostock Corp. provides.
The film was produced by I.G. Production and the soundtrack was done by Kenji Kawai, so it has a similar feel to the Ghost in the Shell series (which was done by the same people). It was distributed in the U.S. by Sony Pictures, without an English dub. There is also a game for the Wii, Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, which has been translated into English; and a manga and the aforementioned novel series, which have not.
January 31, 2011
Kobato, by CLAMP
Kobato is something between a slice-of-life and a mystery series, with a touch of fantasy (more along the lines of xxxHolic, where the story is set in current Japan with supernatural events occurring, rather than Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, where supernatural events occur in strange worlds). On the surface it's the story of a girl named Kobato Hanato who gets a job working at a kindergarten plagued by money troubles; but below that is the mystery of why the yakuza threatening to close the kindergarten is married to the woman running it, and who Kobato really is.
Because Kobato has a wish: she wants to go somewhere. And in order to do so, she has to fill a magic bottle with the fragments of injured hearts that she has healed. I'd almost say this series has a magical girl angle, except Kobato (so far) doesn't transform and hasn't fought anyone. But the reason she asked for her job at the kindergarten was to try and help the owner of it with her problems, thereby healing her heart and making Kobato one step closer to her wish.
In addition, there's another story going on: Kobato has some kind of spirit guide (this is the best term I can think of to explain the abusive, animate stuffed animal who is helping her on her quest--think Cerberus with a lot of rage), Ioryogi, who has his own motives for wanting to see her wish come true. He has no chance of being freed from the form he's currently in unless Kobato succeeds. And Ioryogi isn't the only supernatural creature stuck in a body that isn't his own; there are other creatures, too, and it's been implied that Kobato herself isn't human (or at least, sure isn't a normal one). There's clearly something going on in the spiritual world, and Kobato is involved, regardless of whether she knows it or not.
Kobato seems like a sweet, fun read; but if you're like me and you've read a lot of CLAMP's works, a warning light probably went off as soon as I mentioned that she had a wish. The series is cute and sweet; but there's a darker undercurrent to it that has me counting pages until we learn that one character is blind in their right eye. After all, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye: then it's CLAMP.
Kobato is translated by Yen Press, which is something of a newcomer in the field of manga, but which is a company I've always admired for both their diverse titles and their translations. The series was put on hiatus by CLAMP in 2005, and then was not so much resumed as restarted (opening at an earlier point in the timeline) in 2007. There are 5 volumes so far; 3 have been translated into English, with volume 4 coming out in May. There is also an anime of the series that ran for 24 episodes from 2009-2010, but so far it has not been brought over in subtitled or dubbed form.
Because Kobato has a wish: she wants to go somewhere. And in order to do so, she has to fill a magic bottle with the fragments of injured hearts that she has healed. I'd almost say this series has a magical girl angle, except Kobato (so far) doesn't transform and hasn't fought anyone. But the reason she asked for her job at the kindergarten was to try and help the owner of it with her problems, thereby healing her heart and making Kobato one step closer to her wish.
In addition, there's another story going on: Kobato has some kind of spirit guide (this is the best term I can think of to explain the abusive, animate stuffed animal who is helping her on her quest--think Cerberus with a lot of rage), Ioryogi, who has his own motives for wanting to see her wish come true. He has no chance of being freed from the form he's currently in unless Kobato succeeds. And Ioryogi isn't the only supernatural creature stuck in a body that isn't his own; there are other creatures, too, and it's been implied that Kobato herself isn't human (or at least, sure isn't a normal one). There's clearly something going on in the spiritual world, and Kobato is involved, regardless of whether she knows it or not.
Kobato seems like a sweet, fun read; but if you're like me and you've read a lot of CLAMP's works, a warning light probably went off as soon as I mentioned that she had a wish. The series is cute and sweet; but there's a darker undercurrent to it that has me counting pages until we learn that one character is blind in their right eye. After all, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye: then it's CLAMP.
Kobato is translated by Yen Press, which is something of a newcomer in the field of manga, but which is a company I've always admired for both their diverse titles and their translations. The series was put on hiatus by CLAMP in 2005, and then was not so much resumed as restarted (opening at an earlier point in the timeline) in 2007. There are 5 volumes so far; 3 have been translated into English, with volume 4 coming out in May. There is also an anime of the series that ran for 24 episodes from 2009-2010, but so far it has not been brought over in subtitled or dubbed form.
January 17, 2011
Tokyo Vice, by Jake Adelstein
While this isn't quite manga, it goes into so much depth about Tokyo, Japan, and Japanese culture that I have to recommend it.
Jake Adelstein is an American who went to college in Japan and then became a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers (one chapter gives a great description of the entrance exams and training that he went through to do it). There, he went into the Vice Beat area, and began covering the seedy aspects of Tokyo and nearby Saitama, including yakuza (the Japanese mafia) activities, murders, host club scams, and a group of robbers who once stole an entire ATM machine using a forklift.
In the process, Adelstein learns a lot about the workings of the police, the give and take between police and reporters, and especially about yakuza-related crime (this is because one of his stories gets his life threatened by the head of one of the biggest yakuza groups--in fact, it's the reason Adelstein and his family are currently living back in the United States). He also writes a lot about Japan, including real-life examples of sempai-kohai relationships, host clubs (most are not, in fact, run like Ouran's), and basic details about Japan that are really interesting: I've been reading manga for nearly 11 years, and I was well aware of the public bathhouse system in Japan, but I had no idea that there are also coin-operated showers! (At the time of Adelstein's writing, 100 yen would get you five minutes of hot water.)
Since one of my favorite manga, Sanctuary (by Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami) is about yakuza and politicians, I had to pick this up. And I definitely learned a lot about yakuza from it, and even some about Japanese politics: I had no idea that the reigning party in Japan, the (quite misnamed and very conservative) Liberal Democratic Party, was founded by yakuza money given to the creator of the LDP--apparently this is an open secret in the country! The things you learn.
What fascinated me the most, however, was Adelstein's breakdown of the different districts within Tokyo. I knew the main names--Shibuya, Shinjuku, Roppongi, Akibahara--but I didn't know much about the different aspects of them. The one I knew most about was Akibahara, and that's because any otaku worth their salt has to know the electronics/manga/doujinshi/otaku playground. (Plus, a good chunk of Genshiken takes place there, so.) But Adelstein goes a lot more in-depth about the areas, including what businesses (mainly shady) tend to be where and what each district is most famous for (for Roppongi, it's apparently catering to foreigners. No wonder I never see that place much in manga).
Tokyo Vice contains a ton of information about Japan, including a whole lot about the side that you don't see much in manga (at least, outside of seinen, or manga geared toward adult men), on top of all the vice beat stories. If you're interested in more details of Japan and Japanese culture to better understand the background behind your favorite manga, this book is a great place to start.
Jake Adelstein is an American who went to college in Japan and then became a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers (one chapter gives a great description of the entrance exams and training that he went through to do it). There, he went into the Vice Beat area, and began covering the seedy aspects of Tokyo and nearby Saitama, including yakuza (the Japanese mafia) activities, murders, host club scams, and a group of robbers who once stole an entire ATM machine using a forklift.
In the process, Adelstein learns a lot about the workings of the police, the give and take between police and reporters, and especially about yakuza-related crime (this is because one of his stories gets his life threatened by the head of one of the biggest yakuza groups--in fact, it's the reason Adelstein and his family are currently living back in the United States). He also writes a lot about Japan, including real-life examples of sempai-kohai relationships, host clubs (most are not, in fact, run like Ouran's), and basic details about Japan that are really interesting: I've been reading manga for nearly 11 years, and I was well aware of the public bathhouse system in Japan, but I had no idea that there are also coin-operated showers! (At the time of Adelstein's writing, 100 yen would get you five minutes of hot water.)
Since one of my favorite manga, Sanctuary (by Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami) is about yakuza and politicians, I had to pick this up. And I definitely learned a lot about yakuza from it, and even some about Japanese politics: I had no idea that the reigning party in Japan, the (quite misnamed and very conservative) Liberal Democratic Party, was founded by yakuza money given to the creator of the LDP--apparently this is an open secret in the country! The things you learn.
What fascinated me the most, however, was Adelstein's breakdown of the different districts within Tokyo. I knew the main names--Shibuya, Shinjuku, Roppongi, Akibahara--but I didn't know much about the different aspects of them. The one I knew most about was Akibahara, and that's because any otaku worth their salt has to know the electronics/manga/doujinshi/otaku playground. (Plus, a good chunk of Genshiken takes place there, so.) But Adelstein goes a lot more in-depth about the areas, including what businesses (mainly shady) tend to be where and what each district is most famous for (for Roppongi, it's apparently catering to foreigners. No wonder I never see that place much in manga).
Tokyo Vice contains a ton of information about Japan, including a whole lot about the side that you don't see much in manga (at least, outside of seinen, or manga geared toward adult men), on top of all the vice beat stories. If you're interested in more details of Japan and Japanese culture to better understand the background behind your favorite manga, this book is a great place to start.
December 29, 2010
New December manga!
You may have noticed already, but there is a ton of new manga in at the Mooresville library! Some of these are new volumes to series we already have, like Tsubasa, Case Closed, ./hack, and (waiting to be laminated) Kingdom Hearts, but others are completely new: Death Note, Hellsing, Kobato, Deadman Wonderland, and Bokurano: Ours are just a few.
A lot of the titles were those requested by the anime/manga club (sorry, guys, we couldn't order Spice & Wolf because it's rated M), so stop by and check it out. The new manga are on the bottom row of the shelf closest to the reference desk, and are now labeled with new book tags.
Plus, several volumes and series are still waiting to be laminated so they can go out on the shelves, so there'll be even more manga available in January!
A lot of the titles were those requested by the anime/manga club (sorry, guys, we couldn't order Spice & Wolf because it's rated M), so stop by and check it out. The new manga are on the bottom row of the shelf closest to the reference desk, and are now labeled with new book tags.
Plus, several volumes and series are still waiting to be laminated so they can go out on the shelves, so there'll be even more manga available in January!
December 03, 2010
Case Closed, by Gosho Aoyama
Ironically, I haven't been updating this blog lately because I've been so busy reading manga!
Case Closed is primarily a murder mystery series, in the sense that the main character runs into a dead body practically once a week. (I'm getting a little concerned that Japan will be depopulated by the time the series ends.) It's set in modern Japan and centered in a fictionalized and nameless Tokyo, although the characters sometimes travel to other parts of the country, and the main secondary characters are located in Osaka.
Since the English translations gave many of the characters English names--even more so in the anime than the manga--I'm going to go with those to avoid confusion.
Case Closed is the story of teenaged super-sleuth Jimmy Kudo, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan who dreams of becoming a P.I. But he gets in over his head when he runs afoul of an crime syndicate whose members all dress in black--Jimmy catches them in the middle of a crime, but is knocked out and poisoned before he can stop them. However, the poison he's given is a new type that the organization was working on, and instead of killing him, it reverts him back to his eight-year-old self.
Yeah. I'm not gonna lie; this series is kind of cheesy. Jimmy even has a family friend who's an inventor and gives him a bunch of gadgets to help him continue to fight crime even as a kid, including a bow-tie that is actually a voice modulator, a pair of super-powered sneakers, and fake glasses that are a screen for tracking devices. It's pretty great.
Jimmy's best friend Rachel Moore's father, Richard, is a private detective himself, so after Jimmy has been shrunk he takes the name Conan Edogawa (taken from the creator of Holmes and from a famous Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Rampo--who himself created his pseudonym to sound like "Edgar Allen Poe") and lives with them. There, he starts solving mysteries in order to make Richard famous enough that he'll begin receiving cases tangled up with the crime syndicate. He does this by knocking out Richard (using a watch that shoots tranquilizer darts! I'm not making this up) and using his voice modulator to imitate his voice and solve the cases. As time goes by Jimmy does begin getting closer to the organization, and acquires more allies who know his secret: some likely, such as Harley Hartwell, son of a famous Osaka police officer and who's known as the great Detective of the West (Jimmy, unsurprisingly, is known as the Detective of the East, making him and Harley rivals when they first meet); and some not so much, like the retro-thief Kaito Kid (a tie-in to one of Aoyama's previous series) or Anita, a former member of the crime syndicate who fled their ranks after also being shrunk to kid-size.
The anime follows the manga pretty closely, without as much filler as you'd normally expect (unlike those months and months of Naruto filler episodes while the anime waited for the manga timeskip to occur and then scrambled to catch up to it). The main difference is that the storylines are told in different orders. The whole crime syndicate plot is basically a way to tie together a lot of individual murder mysteries, and only come up every few volumes or a couple of times per season.
The Case Closed manga is being published by Viz, while the anime is licensed and translated by Funimation. Volume 36 will be coming out soon in English, but in Japan the series is at 700+ chapters and nearly 600 episodes (!) and still going strong--putting it on the same level as Naruto, Bleach, or Inuyasha.
Case Closed is primarily a murder mystery series, in the sense that the main character runs into a dead body practically once a week. (I'm getting a little concerned that Japan will be depopulated by the time the series ends.) It's set in modern Japan and centered in a fictionalized and nameless Tokyo, although the characters sometimes travel to other parts of the country, and the main secondary characters are located in Osaka.
Since the English translations gave many of the characters English names--even more so in the anime than the manga--I'm going to go with those to avoid confusion.
Case Closed is the story of teenaged super-sleuth Jimmy Kudo, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan who dreams of becoming a P.I. But he gets in over his head when he runs afoul of an crime syndicate whose members all dress in black--Jimmy catches them in the middle of a crime, but is knocked out and poisoned before he can stop them. However, the poison he's given is a new type that the organization was working on, and instead of killing him, it reverts him back to his eight-year-old self.
Yeah. I'm not gonna lie; this series is kind of cheesy. Jimmy even has a family friend who's an inventor and gives him a bunch of gadgets to help him continue to fight crime even as a kid, including a bow-tie that is actually a voice modulator, a pair of super-powered sneakers, and fake glasses that are a screen for tracking devices. It's pretty great.
Jimmy's best friend Rachel Moore's father, Richard, is a private detective himself, so after Jimmy has been shrunk he takes the name Conan Edogawa (taken from the creator of Holmes and from a famous Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Rampo--who himself created his pseudonym to sound like "Edgar Allen Poe") and lives with them. There, he starts solving mysteries in order to make Richard famous enough that he'll begin receiving cases tangled up with the crime syndicate. He does this by knocking out Richard (using a watch that shoots tranquilizer darts! I'm not making this up) and using his voice modulator to imitate his voice and solve the cases. As time goes by Jimmy does begin getting closer to the organization, and acquires more allies who know his secret: some likely, such as Harley Hartwell, son of a famous Osaka police officer and who's known as the great Detective of the West (Jimmy, unsurprisingly, is known as the Detective of the East, making him and Harley rivals when they first meet); and some not so much, like the retro-thief Kaito Kid (a tie-in to one of Aoyama's previous series) or Anita, a former member of the crime syndicate who fled their ranks after also being shrunk to kid-size.
The anime follows the manga pretty closely, without as much filler as you'd normally expect (unlike those months and months of Naruto filler episodes while the anime waited for the manga timeskip to occur and then scrambled to catch up to it). The main difference is that the storylines are told in different orders. The whole crime syndicate plot is basically a way to tie together a lot of individual murder mysteries, and only come up every few volumes or a couple of times per season.
The Case Closed manga is being published by Viz, while the anime is licensed and translated by Funimation. Volume 36 will be coming out soon in English, but in Japan the series is at 700+ chapters and nearly 600 episodes (!) and still going strong--putting it on the same level as Naruto, Bleach, or Inuyasha.
November 22, 2010
October 27, 2010
Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa & Osamu Tezuka
I mentioned that Pluto was one of our new September manga. But the summary for it in that post doesn't really do the series justice.
Now, I have to admit that I haven't watched Astro Boy, so I don't know the original version of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" storyline. Urasawa's version was my first introduction to it. But reading Pluto has really made me consider tracking down the original!
Pluto is part murder mystery, part robot battles, and all suspense. While Atom (the Japanese name of Astro Boy) and his sister are the most prominent characters in the series, the actual plot of the story revolves around an Europol robot detective named Gesicht as he attempts to solve a string of robot and human deaths. It is set in several locations, mostly Germany, Japan, and Persia.
Initially the deaths are assumed to be a violent outgrowth of anti-robot fervor, since all the victims, human and robot, were with two exceptions participants or otherwise involved in the 39th Middle East War; but soon it appears that it's a robot doing the killing--meaning these are the first robot-caused murders in nearly a decade. Because robots exist in a sort of second-class citizens state (like that in Penny Arcade's Automata project, but not quite as bad), the idea that a robot is now killing humans causes Gesicht's superiors to put a lot of pressure on him to solve the case and present the public with a suspect, fast. But he also must deal with politicians who are trying to deflect attention from the war crimes that occurred during the 39th Middle East War, scientists who are attempting to conceal the illegal research in robotics that led to the creation of the murderer, and a human supremacist group with a member who is out to destroy Gesicht for personal reasons, all while trying to protect the remaining robots who fought in the war from being destroyed.
Pluto is published by Viz in the United States. It is a complete series at 8 volumes, all of which have been translated. So far, the Mooresville Public Library has volume 1. There is currently no anime version.
Now, I have to admit that I haven't watched Astro Boy, so I don't know the original version of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" storyline. Urasawa's version was my first introduction to it. But reading Pluto has really made me consider tracking down the original!
Pluto is part murder mystery, part robot battles, and all suspense. While Atom (the Japanese name of Astro Boy) and his sister are the most prominent characters in the series, the actual plot of the story revolves around an Europol robot detective named Gesicht as he attempts to solve a string of robot and human deaths. It is set in several locations, mostly Germany, Japan, and Persia.
Initially the deaths are assumed to be a violent outgrowth of anti-robot fervor, since all the victims, human and robot, were with two exceptions participants or otherwise involved in the 39th Middle East War; but soon it appears that it's a robot doing the killing--meaning these are the first robot-caused murders in nearly a decade. Because robots exist in a sort of second-class citizens state (like that in Penny Arcade's Automata project, but not quite as bad), the idea that a robot is now killing humans causes Gesicht's superiors to put a lot of pressure on him to solve the case and present the public with a suspect, fast. But he also must deal with politicians who are trying to deflect attention from the war crimes that occurred during the 39th Middle East War, scientists who are attempting to conceal the illegal research in robotics that led to the creation of the murderer, and a human supremacist group with a member who is out to destroy Gesicht for personal reasons, all while trying to protect the remaining robots who fought in the war from being destroyed.
Pluto is published by Viz in the United States. It is a complete series at 8 volumes, all of which have been translated. So far, the Mooresville Public Library has volume 1. There is currently no anime version.
September 02, 2010
New September Manga
New manga at the library this month are:
Nightschool: the Weirn Books vol. 1 & 2
A young witch goes from homeschooling to the Nightschool, where she must navigate the perils of the classroom.
Ultimo vol. 1
The mechanical embodiments of good and evil were deactivated long ago; but now they've been awakened, with consequences for the teenager who caused it.
Pluto vol. 1
One of the most famous storylines of Astro Boy, retold by the creator of Monster and 20th Century Boys.
Cirque du Freak vol. 1
Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak vampire series: retold in manga form! Not everything is the same as before, though, ans some of the changes may surprise you.
Nightschool: the Weirn Books vol. 1 & 2
A young witch goes from homeschooling to the Nightschool, where she must navigate the perils of the classroom.
Ultimo vol. 1
The mechanical embodiments of good and evil were deactivated long ago; but now they've been awakened, with consequences for the teenager who caused it.
Pluto vol. 1
One of the most famous storylines of Astro Boy, retold by the creator of Monster and 20th Century Boys.
Cirque du Freak vol. 1
Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak vampire series: retold in manga form! Not everything is the same as before, though, ans some of the changes may surprise you.
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