Reading Phoenix in the past year really opened my eyes to the skills of Osamu Tezuka, and I've made a promise to myself to check out more of his work in 2003. Astro Boy is one of his most well-known and popular creations, and after giving this volume a read, I can see why. Like Phoenix, it combines comedy, tragedy, science-fiction and social commentary into a surprisingly deep and forward-thinking tale. There are some humorous elements that I don't think were meant to be funny, and some of the social commentary seems naive in the harsh light of modern examination, but mostly this volume struck me, as did Tezuka's other work that I've read, as visionary and exciting.
Coming in at volume six, I was a little worried that I might not know what was going on, but this is apparently the start of a new story, which finds the futuristic robot Astro Boy cast into the past of the 1960s and partnered up with an alien and a young boy in Japan. Everything you need to know about Astro is presented early on, and both Scara, his alien "sister" and Shin-Chan, the boy beggar who becomes his friend, are actually introduced in these pages. In addition, the storytelling style of Tezuka, while it works perfectly in this long-form format, actually seems to be composed of short-form arcs and even one or two page stories that tie together into a longer tale.
Astro Boy is an interesting personality, somewhat naive about the ways of the world but simultaneously smart and intuitive, and he has an innate goodness which seems hard-wired to him. Astro takes on strangers and their problems without a thought, and though he is driven by a need to get himself back to the future so that he doesn't "die," he is more than willing to expend his powers in order to help others. The problems he faces often relate to social ills like nuclear testing and materialism, even as they contain fantastic elements like alien races and robots. Because the book was written some time ago and in a different country, there are some elements of strangeness that come off as unintentionally funny. Most notable, of course, are Astro Boy's machine guns, which fire out of his rear end, but there is also some stiffness to the character interaction that is reminiscent of American comics from the era by Marvel or DC.
The artwork, like all of Tezuka's work, has a cartoony tone to it that doesn't forbid him dealing with more serious or dramatic stories such as Scara's trouble fitting in with society or Astro's loneliness and battery troubles. Much of the book is almost an illustrated novel format, with Tezuka writing out descriptions and dialogue alongside scattered panels, but his text is just about as evocative as his artwork, and the result is that I didn't notice sometimes when the book shifted from panel-to-panel storytelling to illustrated panel formats.
While it's a self-contained read, Astro Boy 6 is one volume amongst many, and it does end on something of a cliffhanger. I'm looking forward to seeing what happened before and after this issue, and it looks like Tezuka has hooked me on an unknown property once again.
