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In my mind, Astro Boy is to manga and anime what Mario is to videogames or The Citizen Kane is to movies, you kinda have to go through them if you are fan of their mediums, because of the impact they had in them. And since watching any of its anime is a no-no for me, I decided to go and read the manga, which is after all the original version.
It’s not an easy thing to do though, as you won’t find two sites with the same information about it, there’s a different number of chapters and volumes everywhere you look at. So this review is based on the Dark Horse Comics version, which compiles everything in 98 chapters and supposedly misses other two chapters (which you can still find online and are very short).
Since it’s an official English release, it means that the most names were localized, which wasn’t that big of a deal, I was reading the manga from left to right, which was weird, but most important of all, the order of the chapters is not chronological, but instead some weird selection supposedly arranged by Tezuka himself. Let me tell you that this way the narrative is one big mess, concepts and moments are repeated, references to events are made without the original happening yet at times, characters are introduced for the first time way after you have already seen them for a lot of chapters, and so on.
But honestly even if the manga was in order, it would still be just episodic stories of varying yet overall not so great quality amongst them, as it is usually the case with episodic or anthological series.
This is fairly obvious and well known but what can’t be denied is how creative and influential the scenarios are, you can find a later concept or character in almost every chapter. On the earliest volumes alone, things reminded me of Megaman, One Piece, Magic Kaito, Speed Racer, Mazinger Z and so on.
Still, I consider worth mentioning that even the simplest concepts can sometimes elevate to global, interplanetary or space wars in scope and scale, but the resolutions always leave a lot to be desired and the tone is never that serious, Tezuka even breaks the fourth wall at times and sometimes even features himself in the manga, it is a manga for very young readers after all.
Which is a shame because if the stories were more serious and different, we would have a pretty good collection of sci-fi ideas in here. Some that I want to bother to mention are Greatest Robot on Earth (but only because it inspired Pluto), Ghost Manufacturing Machine, which satirizes nazism, Hitler and the Valkyrie operation, the Once Upon a Time continuity, where Astro goes back in time, with varying results in quality, Subterranean Tank, that is mostly missing Astro.
Finally, the Blue Knight, where a robot rebels against humans because of the way they treat them, and the human response was to basically put the robots through a holocaust, so they end up creating a robot nation, and the villain of the story even manages to convince Astro himself. Probably the best chapter in the whole manga, worthy of getting its own Pluto-like spin off, but its ending and continuation leave a lot to be desired.
After the magazine where the manga was published closed down, it moved to another one, and the stories became shorter and even more childish, resulting in the last volumes of the manga being considerably worse and with barely any time to explore its ideas and concepts.
Other issues in quality are the exposition, which is quite bad, as characters tend to mention and overexplain even the most obvious things, and even in not the most appropriate ways, such as villains exposing their plans or backstories in the middle of nowhere.
And the characters are closer to simple caricatures, and they’re not that consistent either, as they should know and trust Astro the whole time, but sometimes the conflict escalates because they do not pay attention to him or act sillier than normal just because.
As for the visual quality, there is a lot of needless exposition as I said, and the actual drawings and panelling show varying quality, partly because Tezuka improved throughout the years, partly because many different assistants worked on the manga, and later on went on to become important authors themselves, and well, partly because the Dark Horse order is a mess.
As a whole, you can find a lot of innovation and a starting point for plenty of anime, manga and even Japanese videogames in here, creativity regarding sci-fi scenarios, an often big scale in conflict, and a noticeable improvement in visual quality throughout the manga, but the narrative, exposition, execution, characterization and what passes as a conclusion, if there’s even any to begin with, leave a lot to be desired, thus coming off as a title more important to read for historical reasons than anything else, but otherwise not really worth going through.
5/10
