Astro Boy Review

Everything the medium does now starts here. Tezuka draws in a cinematic language nobody is using in 1952, cutting between angles, holding on silent panels, letting a page move like film, and he pairs it with a premise far darker than the cheerful design implies. Atom is built to replace a dead child, rejected by the man who builds him, and spends most of the run as a mediator between humans who fear robots and robots who have every reason to resent humans.

The best chapters are genuine civil rights parables and they do not end happily. The problem is the sixteen years. This is an episodic serial for a monthly boys magazine, so quality swings hard from chapter to chapter, the earliest stories creak badly, and Tezuka's habit of redrawing his own work across decades leaves the collected run tonally inconsistent. Come for the invention and the ideas rather than a sustained arc and it repays the trip. As a foundation stone it has no rival in comics anywhere.