Why Should Humans Have All The Fun?

This guy, he could give Vision and Red Tornado a run for his money in the "emo robot" category.

Naoki Urasawa's Pluto is an homage, reimagining, something like that of a particular story arc from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy. I bought the first volume last spring, and I should have volume 4 in a week or so. The first two volumes established some of the characters, and the central mystery. Namely, who or what is going around killing some of the most advanced, powerful artificial intelligences in the world?

This is volume 3, which is largely moving pieces around, revealing a few more of the players. Most of the focus is on Uran, the younger sister of Atom (who is the Astro stand-in), who is able to sense emotions and finds a robot who is very distressed living in a tunnel. She tries to help him, encourage his apparent gift for painting, but there's more to him than that.

There's also a subplot about a group who hate that robots are being granted rights, and how one member of their group had a brother who seems to have been killed by Interpol's lone robot inspector (who is currently working on the case of all these other famous robots being murdered).

There are a lot of panels of people looking down at the ground glumly, or just looking troubled. Which at least fits with where things stands. Almost everyone is confused, either by people or robots they're talking to, or by whatever mystery they're investigating, or the way the world is changing around them. A few people are lashing out, but most of them seem stuck in a kind of stasis. They can't decide how to go forward, so they're just frustrated.

I can't help feeling the book would work better for me if I had greater familiarity with the source material. I feel there are things I'm missing because I know only the barest outline about Astro Boy. Young boy robot, extremely powerful, protects humanity from other powerful robots, that's the extent of it. Or maybe it's the pacing. Have this vague feeling of "get on with it!" Being diverted from the threads that were interesting to me in the first two volumes to focus on things that, so far, don't interest me.