Dr. Stone Review

A green flash turns every human being on Earth to stone, and Senku Ishigami, a high school student who kept count of the seconds for three thousand seven hundred years, breaks out into a world reclaimed by forest. His plan is simple to state and absurd to carry out: rebuild human science in order, from fire and soap through glass, iron, sulpha drugs and radio, and use it to revive everyone else.

Riichiro Inagaki writes each discovery as a set piece with a real cost in labour and failure, and the ingenuity of the sequencing, what you must make before you can make what you want, is the book's great pleasure. Boichi's art does as much of the work: detailed, muscular and surprisingly funny, it turns a lesson on sulphuric acid into an action scene.

The antagonists are the weak point. Tsukasa's ideology is set up with care and then defused rather than argued with, and much of the cast around Senku, Chrome, Kohaku and Gen among them, exists to react to him. The last arcs, a voyage across the Pacific, a race around the world and finally a trip to the moon, accelerate until the science becomes a montage. It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2019 and remains Weekly Shonen Jump's most sincere love letter to science.