Astro Boy Volume 4
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
Standing shoulder to shoulder with comics and animation icons Krazy Kat, Mickey Mouse, and Tin Tin, Osama Tezuka's Astro Boy remains as fresh today as when the boy robot first appeared nearly fifty years ago. And Tezuka's Astro Boy original manga are now finally available in America in an English-language edition, produced in collaboration with Studio Proteus and translated by Frederik L. Schodt, well-known to manga readers for his work on Ghost in the Shell. In this volume: Astro fights to free abused robots from a robot theme park that masks a secret weapons factory; Astro and fellow robots are stranded on the moon only to discover a valley full of diamonds...but they are not alone, and the diamonds are not unguarded; Astro becomes trapped in the twentieth century after a child prodigy's time machine breaks down; and Professor Ochanomizu and Astro Boy are caught up in a movement to overthrow a dictator who has a machine capable of producing human clones...and a force of evil robots to defend it!
This volume contains the following stories:
Robot Land
Ivan the Fool
A Day to Remember Ghost Manufacturing Machine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For those unfamiliar with Tezuka, Japan's manga master, the first English translation of the original Astro Boy series will be a revelation, both for its inventive charm and for its surprising sophistication. In "The Greatest Robot on Earth," the novel-length first story of this third volume in the series, the eponymous hero is one of seven robots being targeted by a crazy sultan intent on declaring his own robot, Pluto, the greatest in the world. Pluto dispatches his competitors with ease, but Astro Boy is a robot of a different order. He's the size and shape of a little boy, with spirit and spunk to match, and also has searchlight eyes, jet rockets in his feet and an atomic engine for a heart. This is a pre-digital, 1950s Cold War vision of modernity. Astro Boy must open his chest when he wants to check the time, and the threat of an arms race haunts the story, but Tezuka's generous characterizations give this story a timeless relevance. These robots might disintegrate into piles of screws and bolts, but like humans, they're capable of pride, affection and even a kind of love. Operating out of a steadfast loyalty, they are undone by the greed of the humans who created them. The clean, bold lines of Tezuka's remarkably efficient artwork complement his dynamic storytelling, proving the artist equally adept at capturing nuances in expressions and the explosive action of fight sequences. Entertaining and beautifully executed, this, along with the other pocket-sized editions in the series, is destined to become a classic.
