Sunday Splash Page #411

"Casualties," in Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka ch. 11, vol. 2, by Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, and Takashi Nagasaki

Someone is targeting the seven most advanced robots of the world, as well as those who advocate for the rights of robots. Victims are left displayed with something resembling horns sticking from the ground around their head, like the Roman God of Death. The Europol detective assigned to the case of the murdered activists, Inspector Gesicht, is one of those "great" robots himself, so a failure to solve the mystery in time could have very real consequences for him.

Pluto is a work of Naoki Urasawa's, inspired by Osamu Tezuka's "The Greatest Robot on Earth" story in the manga we know here in the States as Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom in Japan.) I don't know the original work, don't know much about the character or his world, period, so I can't say in what ways this is inspired, and in what ways it's simply Urasawa's own thing that just happens to inhabit a fictional world created by another writer/artist.

The impetus for the attacks traces back to the "39th Central Asian War", where the President of the United States of Thracia convinced the rest of the world the Persian Kingdom had too big a robot army, and was working on dangerously advanced artificial intelligences which could threaten the world. So they invaded, with those same seven robots taking part to one degree or another. Some fought, others, like the pacifist Epsilon, refused to fight, but helped with surveys after the war that sought proof of these dangerous A.I.s.

They didn't find anything, except a bunch of shattered remains of robot bodies. No sign of the alleged brilliant scientist Persia had working for them, "Dr. Goji," either. But now something was killing advanced robots, and people who advocated for their rights. Something that seemed to harness nature itself.

Something Urasawa does, after the murder of Mont Blanc kicks things off, is spend time with each of the robots. What they do, what they want. North No. 2 - the second to go - is built for war, but chooses to act as butler for a blind pianist, one brilliant but embittered. North No. 2 keeps all his weapons concealed beneath a cloak, and asks to be taught to play the piano. Brando became one of two great fighting champions (another of the robots, Hercules, is the other), but he and his wife have a house full of kids. Epsilon takes in orphans, including one boy traumatized by something he saw during the 39th Central Asian War. Gesicht has a wife, and they discuss maybe adopting a child, or going on vacations. Even robots that aren't designed to look as human have lives. Gesicht delivers the news to the wife of a robot cop that was badly damaged by an assailant, and both are shiny metal, with Johnny-Five like faces and dimensions. But the loss of her husband shakes the wife dearly.

It makes it seem odd that Gesicht treats things like struggling to tell if Atom is human or robot as a rare experience, because all these robots seem human. Maybe "alive" is the better word. They aren't the same as humans, but they're still alive. They seem able to hallucinate, or see things that aren't real, as they die. Brando cries out that he won against Pluto, even though he didn't. Gesicht sees the past when he dies, the things that were locked away from him in his memory.

Urasawa spends a lot of panels on close-ups of faces, and I don't think you could tell from the expressions, which characters were organic and which weren't. Maybe Gesicht doesn't pout or grumble like some of the human cops Atom interacts with, but he smiles softly, he narrows his eyes, he shouts or grows angry when someone he cares about is attacked. He's aware he interprets the world differently from humans, that he drinks tea just to look normal. That he even bothers to pretend, to put people at ease, or simply for his own reasons, seems like a living, thinking response.

The other major theme I notice is memory. The various robots often exchange memory cards, or connect to each other wirelessly as a way to share evidence. In this way, sometimes one character learns something the other didn't notice, or doesn't remember. Atom finds something in Gesicht's memories that he's forgotten. Or more accurately, been made to forget. Hercules comments that humans erect monuments, or hold memorials, to preserve a memory against being forgotten, while robots never forget, so long as they don't erase the memory.

What we see in this story is humans do a lot more than just build monuments or hold vigils for those they miss or admire. Atom was created by Dr. Tenma to replace his dead son. Tenma, however, considers Atom a failure, because he isn't like Tenma's son. He likes a book on insects he found, a gift from Tenma the dead boy hid away. And Pluto, and the mysterious "Bora", are both products of a man's unwillingness to let go. They're monuments to his anger, to his loss, and he wants the world to be unable to forget, no matter how much damage that requires, even to himself or his children.