Romancing The Stone: Too Late, Somebody Already Showed Her Azzarello's Cage

Pluto Vol. 2
By Naoki Urasawa
Published by Viz

This story is really unlike anything else. In gathering my thoughts, I was trying to think of parallels I could draw between Pluto and other stories - whether it be Star Wars, or The Wizard of Oz, or Oedipus. But I honestly can't come up with anything. Of course, I could just focus on the overarching story of the seven best robots of the world being hunted and destroyed one by one. There's hundreds of stories about people being hunted, divide and conquer style, be it dressed up and acted out the way it is in Predator or Friday the 13th or even--this thing, that I found, when I typed things into google:

"Divide and Conquer" is a key element in A Fistful of Dollars. A Fistful of Dollars got the plot from [Akira] Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which in turn got it from a 1930 gangster film called Roadhouse Nights, which was based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. The same plot was used in the western Django and Last Man Standing.
-some website she found

So yeah, check that out. "Got the plot" and all that. But if that was all this story was about, I don't know that I'd be enjoying it. I could draw parallels between the various stories and say which I like better. (Maybe Predator, that would make certain people very happy.) Pluto though? That's not ALL there is to it. The "divide and conquer" stuff is only part of the story, it's not the whole story, at times, it barely seems like you could really argue that its the frame. The background ideas of robots being so common place and so advanced that they look human and have lobbied for equal rights is just as much a mystery as to who is killing the great robots. The subplot of Detective Gesicht, the "troubled" robot who walks around trying to solve the crimes, all while starting to realize that part of his memory has been erased and replaced, by whom he doesn't know, when he can't remember, and who he cannot name threatens to take over the story completely, and on top of that, there's that one robot, the one who did the unthinkable and actually killed a human being, half-broken and chained down in the basements of a futuristic jail, still "alive", still cruel, still "evil", like some kind of ________.

No - I've never read anything like this. All these varied themes! All these tangled stories! All this emotion!

I'll tell you something, I kind of mentioned it before, but I'll repeat myself, just to be clear. I hear you say "robots" and I think to myself "no thanks". I had my robot phase, and it was over a loooong time ago, and it didn't seem like something I ever needed to do again. Now I have a Roomba that vacuums my floor, and when it's doing that I sort of pretend it's my pet. That's fun; silly, but fun. That's as far as I've gone in twenty years with these things, at least. Far as I thought I'd go, since I'm being so open.

And I am completely dumbstruck by how much I like Pluto. Maybe it's because, when it comes down to it, it's not really about robots? It's about human emotion? Feelings? That's what I'm reading. It's about love. It's about loss. 

It's about fear, too.  

These are robots that are so advanced that they can nearly feel, and for them, "nearly" is so far that it has to count, doesn't it? They evolve. They love, they partner up, they have families. They look at their children, their robot children, and they yearn for them and don't want to leave them but they do, and maybe they do it because of weird programming or old parts, but when I see their faces, it looks to me like they're doing it because they really care. 

That's the story, it's definitely engaging by itself--but the art is perfect. Over and over again, it illustrates what is going on, even though what's being said contradicts it. For instance, Bella had finished fighting the "thing", and he's talking to his friends on the frequency telling them that he did it. He beat it. Everything is going to be okay, that's what he's basically saying. He's telling everybody that it's going to be alright, that they don't have to worry, that's what his words mean. And meanwhile, in the frame we are seeing, pieces of rubble are sinking in the water that's showing his text bubbles. He's clearly been destroyed, and he is not making that clear to his friends. It's poignant, and it hurts. It hurts the same way it does in the prior passage when he breaks his promise of going to the zoo with his wife and kids and tells them he can't because he has an interview.

He never tells us that he's lying. He never has silly sit-com dialogue to himself to let us know he's lying. Naoki Urasawa just shows you what happens, he shows him leave, put on his battle suit, and then he shows them go into the last fight of his life. I'm sure that a novel could have explained it in a wonderfully descriptive way. But this? This way is so much better. This way hurts more, and I think it's supposed to.

I guess you could say I'm falling for this one pretty hard. But you know what? I also know that there's only a limited number of chapters. I'm in it for as long as it lasts, but in the back of my head, I also know it won't be for the long term. So, you know, I'll keep enjoying my other romances while I tango with Pluto. He's a heck of a dance partner.

-Nina Stone, 2010
Previously: Pluto Vol 1

Comments

[RaynardFaux]

"In gathering my thoughts, I was trying to think of parallels I could draw between Pluto and other stories - whether it be Star Wars, or The Wizard of Oz, or Oedipus. But I honestly can't come up with anything."
What about Bladerunner?

[LurkerWithout]

Great insights into the story. I'd say you nailed that the books are more about what it means to be human even though its told from the perspective of various robots...

[Kenny Cather]

Hey Nina,

I hate to be someone recommending something else based on your positive review, but I think this time it's appropriate. Pluto is based on an Astro Boy story called "The Greatest Robot on Earth," and it's also pretty amazingly phenomenal.

I'm a bit of a Tezuka fan (Tezuka created Astro Boy), so I already knew the story going into Pluto. I think Urasawa really nailed it. Every emotion that was in the original story was really fleshed out and given a lot more room in Pluto. Urasawa is really impressive with his story telling chops.

[Theo]

Just a quicky - Read the entire series this weekend and it was amazing, but it did mean i caught a typo in your review; Its 'Brando', not 'Bella'.

Too much Twilight methinks :)