Naoki Urasawa's Pluto

Whew this is the 3rd manga series that I downloaded online. I'm on a manga downloading binge! This one I heard of via this post on jeansnow.net. Jean Snow usually links to cool stuff so I took a look at the article linked to in the post. Turns out that Naoki Urasawa wrote the manga Monster, about a physician who saves a little boy who grows up to be a murderer. I've heard of the anime of the same name that's based on it- it's quite renowned. So anyway, Pluto's quite an interesting manga project. It's actually a remake of a story arc from Osamu Tezuka's seminal Astro Boy titled "The Greatest Robot on Earth." In that story, a powerful robot named Pluto fights the world's seven most powerful robots under orders from his master.

Urasawa's remake focuses on a human-looking robot policeman named Gesicht and his efforts to solve a series of bizzare murders which are connected by a weird visual symbol. Urasawa's interpretation of Tezuka's future world where humans and robots live side by side is both visually arresting and manages to evoke the same kind of emotions that Tezuka's original did. It's very very good stuff. You can download scans here.