Pluto

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Japanese: PLUTO

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Information

Type: Manga

Volumes: 8

Chapters: 65

Status: Finished

Published: Sep 9, 2003 to Apr 1, 2009

Genres: Action, Award Winning, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Suspense

Themes: Detective, Psychological

Demographic: Seinen

Serialization: Big Comic Original

Authors: Urasawa, Naoki (Story & Art), Tezuka, Osamu (Story)

Statistics

Score: 8.62¹ (scored by 50,621 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #95²

² based on the top manga page. Please note that 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #101

Members: 135,699

Favorites: 5,572

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8.62

Ranked #95Popularity #101Members 135,699

MangaBig Comic OriginalUrasawa, Naoki (Story & Art), Tezuka, Osamu (Story)

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Volumes: /8

Chapters: /65

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka

Vol. 1
$11.99

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Synopsis

Famous for his military service in the 39th Asian War, the legendary Swiss robot Montblanc is violently murdered. Humans and robots around the world mourn for the beloved celebrity. Montblanc's popularity only grew in the years following the war, thanks to his dedication to nature conservation and his loving personality.

Fellow war veteran and robotic Europol detective Gesicht is sent to investigate Montblanc's tragic demise. In his pursuit, Gesicht uncovers evidence of a mysterious entity known only as "Pluto." He also learns of a conspiratorial plot to dismantle the eight specialized robots from around the world who participated in the war. Racing against time to save those who still remain, Gesicht grapples with his memory, morality, and a world full of hate, desperately attempting to defend the fragile coexistence of man and machine.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Osamu Tezuka's acclaimed Tetsuwan Atom, seinen mangaka Naoki Urasawa collaborated with Tezuka Productions to create a dark adaptation of The Greatest Robot on Earth story arc. The adaptation shifts the focus from Tezuka's protagonist, Atom, to his supporting character Gesicht in order to better ground the story in realism.

Pluto won the ninth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and the Excellence Prize in the Manga Division at the seventh Japan Media Arts Festival in 2005. It also won the 41st Seiun Award for Best Comic in 2010.

The series was published in English as Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka by VIZ Media under the VIZ Signature imprint from February 17, 2009, to April 6, 2010.

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Reviews

Oct 7, 2025

Azorith

Recommended

Very good and original story! I had already seen the anime adaptation a few years ago before even realizing this manga existed. The mystery aspect throughout was very well done. The pro and anti robot characters on either side of the story was nicely portrayed. It created a great backbone to rest motivations for other parts of the story on.

Some of the seven robots could have been touched on a little more such as Brando and Hercules. I also think that the ending with the "mastermind" behind everything wasn't quite fleshed out enough.

Overall very glad that I read this and will be adding it to ...

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Nov 7, 2024

Mara2463

Recommended

Pluto – Spoiler Free – Recommended

TLDR
Story – 8/10 – 8 x 0.275 = 2,2
Art – 9/10 – 9 x 0.2 = 1,8
Characters – 8/10 – 8 x 0.225 = 1,8
Enjoyment – 8/10 – 8 x 0.3 = 2,4
Total: 8,2 -> 8

Story – 8/10
... Pluto’s story is special: it is the mixture of two genius mangaka – Osamu Tezuka and Naoki Urasawa – that resulted in an adaptation of one of Astroboy’s Arc – The Greatest Robot on Earth – by the pen of Urasawa’s impeccable story-telling abilities.
The story, designed to be a reinterpretation of Tezuka’s arc, follows a detective’s story through the suspenseful and thrilleresque webs of the world of the most advanced robots. It is a reimagining of a world where robots coexist and form an integral part of society, be it as pets, detectives, or regular citizens.
We are introduced to Gesicht, an Europol robot and one of the most advanced robot in the world, as he investigates the murder of Mont Blanc, another very advanced robot in Switzerland.
One is quickly immersed in the plot and Urasawa doesn’t lose time in gripping the reader with a succession of cliffhangers and suspense ridden moments. It is a very engaging story and quite entertaining to read – especially if you are already a fan of his previous works, such as Monster. If you are, you will quickly detect his touch in the story, based with realism and a sense of stakes. Like in Monster, Urasawa is able to maintain the sense of tension throughout the entirety of the manga – without a doubt, a feat. Moreover, the story is robust enough to sustain itself even without its main character – Gesicht. He shows, once more, why he is one of the most influential mangaka of his generation.
One of the main topics of Pluto is definitely the relationship between humans and robots, as well as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – that are here elevated as rule of law. More than just a quick reflection, what Urasawa proposes is a deep questioning about emotions in robots, how emotions can create the perfect robot, how can robots love one another, how can they detect emotions, the mimicking of humanity as a way of integrating in human society, what is, in fact, being human, and, naturally, the role of memory in shaping the robots as individuals. Robot rights are, thus, discussed and are a central part of Pluto.
Robots don’t fit the story as enemies of humanity, nor as diametrical opposed to them. Instead, Pluto takes a step further and blurs the line between human and robot, friend and foe, good and evil – in the sense that evil requires a will, a intention, and an emotion.
One of the strong points of Pluto is the worldbuilding: from a federated Europe, where Germany takes a role, to a futuristic society, Pluto has it all. One also notes Urasawa’s tendency towards some Germanophilia – as is seen in some of his other stories – or, at least, his tendency towards putting German names and German cities in his stories.

Art – 9/10
Urasawa’s artstyle is always impeccable. The art that sustains the worldbuilding is stellar, full of movement, details and a great shadowing. Character design is rich and expressive; emotions are used with great proficiency. It is also quite balanced – i.e., it fits the world perfectly, with no over-the-top elements. There are almost no awe-inspiring panels, although base art is great.

Characters – 8/10
The cast is of great quality. Robots play a major role in the development of the story, although they bear emotions, complicating everything further. The bluring of the line between robots and humans – emotionless machines and creatures with emotions – is very relevant to development of the characters, and form part of several individual character arcs. Moreover, as already mentioned, and without going into spoilers the cast is able to sustain the story even without this main character.
There is also an element of playing God, where characters aim to create, through robotics, the perfect sentient being. This adds a degree of complexity to the pride and ego of the human characters.

Enjoyment – 8/10
The enjoyment of Pluto can only be high. The union of Tezuka and Urasawa is a perfect blend that keeps the reader hooked for hours. The story is filled with cliffhangers, being a thriller of great quality. Moreover, it makes us questions our relationships with robots, what makes us humans, and how emotions play a role in defining everything. For all these reasons, it can only receive a recommendation.

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Jan 12, 2025

Manjirin

Mixed Feelings

Pluto is something of a disjointed narrative that seems to want to say a lot but trips over itself so clumsily that I can't really take it as seriously as it wants to take itself.

To be clear this is a mostly competent story but it's definitely strongest at the start and gets progressively worse as the series goes on, culminating in a fairly contrived ending. This is a similar pattern to that of the other Urasawa work I have read/watched, Monster, where the general concept of the story and sense of journey is strong but the landing can't be stuck and in the end it ... undermines the strength of the story overall. I am starting to recognize that his personal quirks as an author and his method of storytelling is at best not something I personally gel with and at worst comes across just not as proficient and skilled as his reputation would suggest.

The world Urasawa creates here is admittedly fairly unique and creative, mixing elements of real-world places with a healthy dose of fictionalized aspects and overlaying it onto a semi-near futuristic setting that feels distant in some ways but not too distant in others. You have flying cars and advanced humanoid robots but police detectives still wear cheap suits right out of the 90s, that kind of thing. It's charming in many ways and you are left wanting to know more about the world and it's history but we don't get all that much.

Ultimately Urasawa doesn't appear interested in showing us how this imagined human-robot society and economy even works. What percentage of the population are robots? How and why have they not fully displaced humans from the workforce? While it's fine for Urasawa not to want to get bogged down in the details, when your story centers around human-robot relations and interactions these kinds of details strike me as important to consider if you want to craft a fleshed out and believable world which is able to carry the weight of your messages and themes.

The problem here isn't necessarily the setting, it's the fact that Urasawa seems to want to cash-in on the spectacle and novelty of futurism without thinking critically about how such a future could even exist. While this would be fine if this was a comedy or action-oriented series, it's clear that Pluto is intended to be a more cerebral and thoughtful piece of fiction. It comes across as Urasawa wanting to use robots and artificial lifeforms in a way to say something unique about the concepts of life and death but then not bothering to grapple with the details and mechanics around how or why loss in the context of an artificial and presumably fairly robust robot life would mean as much as loss of fragile and fleeting human organic life.

As far as themes explored I find them to be rather ham-fisted and incredibly unimaginative for a work in a sci-fi futuristic fantasy. For instance why on Earth could a robot, once physically "killed", not have their intact memory chip placed into a new body and essentially reborn or revived? This is perhaps the entire point in having removable personality or memory chips in such a world. Your body gets destroyed? No problem, here is a new one. In fact actual human characters in this same world are described as having been turned into robots/cyborgs after their human bodies are destroyed but the actual robots whose bodies perish can't be reconstituted? This is never explained or explored and it's just so dumb given how the story tries to say so much about the tragedy of loss and considering the melodrama that is employed it's just hard to take anything else in this world all that seriously.

Other aspects of the world are also begging to be scrutinized. Urasawa wants us to believe that there have been 38 previous central Asian wars prior to the continually referenced 39th? Where is the real-world analog to this to help make it even remotely believable? Come on. It would have sounded much more plausible if this event was the "5th central Asian war" for instance but Urasawa apparently wanted to impress the audience with such a high number. I'm not impressed, I'm just taken out of the world. This may seem like a small detail but these little contrivances are common and they add up and erode at your immersion and the believability of this setting and the perceived quality of the worldbuilding. When a story takes itself this seriously then so do I and that means some of the silly choices get less of a pass.

The best parts of the story are the small snippets where interesting characters appear and vignettes that tell a condensed story within the larger narrative of Pluto. Sometimes it is the back and forth banter centered on a legendary robot murderer held in something approximating a maximum security prison who came across as a bit too cartoonishly evil but captivating and original at the same time. Other times it was the C plot like the journey of radicalization taken by a man whose murdered brother was part of a anti-robot hate group and the journey coming full circle to the man's subsequent deradicalization and grappling with forgiveness. These episodes within episodes were much more compelling than the actual A or B plots at times.

Where Urasawa is strongest is when he starts to weave vague notions of international conspiracies, shadowy interest groups, slowly building up with the pace of a semi-psychological thriller... but this mostly falls apart as more is uncovered and revealed the less interesting it all turns out to be in the end. Many of the moments intended to be gasp-inducing pin-drops elicited only an eye-roll from me due to how predictable, telegraphed and self-indulgent they were in execution.

I am left unconvinced that this story offers any kind of profound commentary on war, existence, purpose or really any other theme. The anti-war message for example that is touched on repeatedly came across as fairly simplistic and juvenile in it's black-and-white presentation of one side as totally guilty and the other fully framed and misunderstood. Beyond that the message could be summarized as "war is bad". It's all just way too neat, tidy and preachy to carry any real weight and this is how I received the story's other attempts at philosophy.

Having both read the manga and watched the anime I can confirm that very much like Monster before it this is a very faithful manga-to-anime adaptation. It's basically 1:1. But like Monster that means that all the flaws of the manga's narrative translate directly to the anime as well. If I had to recommend one over the other I would probably go with the anime for the animation and presentation alone.

As a work of sci-fi entertainment and as a decent thriller story it isn't bad at all but it is difficult for me to see it as something more profound.

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Poll: Pluto Chapter 12 Discussion DarthDaimyo - Dec 28, 2009	13 replies	by Stefff32 »» Oct 14, 12:18 PM
Poll: Pluto Chapter 65 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) x_Jiro_x - Apr 5, 2009	118 replies	by KitsuFrost »» Jun 16, 3:35 AM
Poll: Pluto Chapter 42 Discussion DarthDaimyo - Mar 4, 2010	7 replies	by propabanta »» Mar 12, 11:20 PM
Poll: Pluto Chapter 10 Discussion DarthDaimyo - Dec 28, 2009	11 replies	by MidnightTv13 »» May 2, 2024 8:24 PM
Poll: Pluto Chapter 7 Discussion Beatnik - Jan 10, 2009	12 replies	by cyandaqil »» Apr 7, 2024 6:12 PM

Pluto
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