There’s something repetitive about how Naoki Urasawa draws. His skill at faces is arguably unmatched, in design and caricaturization. He captures real peoples’ features more than most mangaka even try to, yet his characters still feel completely at home in a comic. But when you read more than one of his stories, you start to notice the similarities. The same exaggerated noses and large foreheads, the same folds in skin and shapes of jaws. Rarely will he completely copy and paste a single design, but he’ll happily reuse the building blocks. It’s like picking random in a game’s character creator — the combination may be unique, but none of the pieces are truly new.

The same, unfortunately, can be said for his stories.

You might not have read Pluto before. But if you’ve read Monster and 20th Century Boys, and perhaps the various Tezuka works that Pluto draws from, then there is little new for it to offer you. Urasawa does not push himself to new places here. He repeats concepts he’s already done, and all he adds is an ode to his favorite things from his childhood.

That’s not to say he is lacking in skill. He may be the most well-rounded, competent mangaka in the industry, in both art and storytelling. His style is easy to read yet complex to analyze. The grounded-ness and western movie inspiration make him an easy choice for those who “don’t like anime.” That mature mass appeal makes it obvious why he’s so highly regarded, and if you quantify how many things he does right, it’s easy to agree he’s one of the best. But the more I read his works and try to qualify them, the more I find myself bothered by the underlying issues.

There’s always the detective. And the villain, whose presence looms over the story, yet is always hiding in the background. You feel the tension that the villain is going to do something next, and that it will be bad, but it’s up to the detective to figure out just what that thing is before they can even consider trying to stop it. Story progression is driven by the key questions — who is the culprit, what is their goal, what motivates that goal, and what history gave them that motivation.

It’s not saying much to point out these similarities between Urasawa’s works. Yes, they’re mystery stories. How insightful of me, to point out that they all do things mystery stories do.

But you could draw all these same comparisons between Monster and 20th Century Boys. Doing so, I find that 20th Century Boys feels like it attempts to innovate upon what Monster did, to go beyond Urasawa’s bread and butter and add some new spices. Its plot structure gave constant surprises, even if believability was stretched thin as it went on. Pluto’s plot structure feels reminiscent to the point of repetitiveness. Gesicht, the detective, goes from place to place, meeting with people that give him nuggets of information that slowly point him toward the answers. Again, it’s standard detective fare. But so many scenes filled me with the worst kind of deja vu. Doesn’t this scene feel exactly the same as something I’ve already read? Then why am I reading it at all?

One of Urasawa’s bread and butter techniques is the episodic focus on side characters, exploring their emotions before they tie into the main plot (often by dying). I don’t have a problem with him bringing this one back — but yet again, I wish he did new things with it.

One of these, early in the story, is emblematic of his writing style. A blind composer spends his aging days playing piano for himself, not for the world. His robotic butler, a robot soldier, wants nothing more than to create music, so he can appreciate beauty for himself. The composer believes a robot couldn’t never do such a thing. Real music is analog and comes from the heart.

It’s a perfect setup. Too perfect. If something like this can make you care and cry, then I’m happy for you, and I wish I could feel the same. I find it to be lacking something, and I’m not sure if I can truly explain what. It’s far too predictable, to begin with — as soon as it begins, you know that the robot will not give up, the composer will get angrier, but they will eventually understand each other better, before the robot dies in combat with the villain of the story. In theory, the concept of this story is strong, even if it completely fails to surprise me. But conforms too closely to that concept, riding on the idea of it alone, and feels like it embodies a generic idea of what a “good story” is rather than doing anything interesting. Perhaps because it plays its hand too early, makes it immediately obvious what it’s going for rather than play with what kind of story the reader should expect. I feel as much emotion reading a summary of that arc as I do from the arc in the manga itself. The execution of the concept is so clean that it’s sterile.

The characters occupy a similar space. They’re crafted well. They do everything right. But I can’t help but find them hard to care about. Gesicht is an interesting man, in the skillset you see him employ to solve the mystery, and his underlying character struggles with the traumatic secret he keeps, and whether he can truly feel things as a robot. There’s no easy mistake to point to, nothing that’s blatant bad writing. But it fails to do anything truly acceptable. Certainly not as interesting as 20th Century Boys’ Kenji, much less Monster’s Tenma.

It might be easier to see in some of the side characters. The ones it actually wants you to care about, at least. Two of them are former soldiers now working as robotic strongman wrestlers. They care about their families, and giving their audiences joy, but as the villainous threat of a robot killing the strongest robots in the world grows, they stake their pride on trying to take it down. They fail, of course. But you already knew that before I said it. And will you really care when their tragedies occur, or will it just feel like going through the motions?

Well, maybe you cared. I’m just trying to explain how I didn’t. It’s okay for us to feel differently.

Where Pluto succeeds is with its inspiration’s titular character, Atom. As well as his sister Uran, who shares many of his ethereally positive qualities. There, Urasawa feels like he captures something genuinely greater than just the sum of tropes. A iconic, archetypal, larger-than-life goodness you see in paragons like Superman. Atom feels like he’s the main character, not of Pluto’s narrative, but of Pluto’s world. I never read Astro Boy, yet Pluto felt like it communicated to me why Atom was such a big deal anyway. All of the robots, when you look closely, are as human and feeling as their biological counterparts. Just in their own way. But Atom, in truth, felt even moreso.

Atom is the focus of the final stretch of the story, and this isn’t quite a good thing. Gesicht exits the narrative in an uninteresting way. If the casualness was the point, if it was meant to be incidental in an unexpected and unavoidable way, then I don’t think it worked very well. He doesn’t leave much of a legacy, even if it does lead to one key plot development that the story needed. And then, yes, Atom is the focus, and it’s no longer a detective story. Now it’s closer to a standard action story. Not quite the cliche battle shonen, but generic all the same. It feels disjoint from the first half. Urasawa finally does something new in Pluto, but it’s simply him doing his take on another author’s work rather than innovating. But I’ll get to that later.

What I do like about the final stretch of Pluto is how well it ties together the themes. I normally hate cycle of hatred themes. So often, they’re forced, hamfisted, and never quite justify their supposed depth. If a character is so consumed by hatred, then don’t make it so easy to change their mind!

Pluto does it right. The hatred feels justified in how extreme it is, and expressed in powerful ways. It’s tied to other themes in a genius way — that hatred that gets passed on and cycled in response to atrocities is the same strong emotion required to properly focus an activate an overly-complicated AI, which is the same hatred that is testament to how in the right circumstances, a robot truly does feel as much emotion as a human. It seemingly falls for one of my pet peeves — when a character consumed by hatred is convinced too easily — but the circumstances do make sense, and Atom is the one who convinces him. The quality with which he is written makes me believe it.

Part of the reason the cycle of hatred themes work is the source of that hatred. Pluto grounds it in one of the few things it feels like Urasawa was genuinely passionate about in this story: The Iraq War. Not the real-life one, but we have the United States analogue making false claims of the Iraq analogue having weapons of mass destruction — I mean robots of mass destruction — and invading and devastating the nation. Children are killed, chances of replacing the desert with flowers are destroyed, and the invaders continue to occupy and oppress the land. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s an expression of how strongly Urasawa feels about what the US did. It conveys the horror of an unjust war, and in doing so it fully explains the anger and desires for vengeance the villain feels.

Unfortunately, there’s a major misstep in this I have to address. The story doesn’t just show the unjust war. It explains it, with the not-US President and teddy bear hyperintelligent AI. Supposedly, they orchestrated everything the main villain did. Narratively, this already makes no sense, feels entirely vestigial and tangential to the plot, and is so unsatisfying that I don’t even care that I’m spoiling it. How did they actually manipulate anything? What was their goal in doing so? It’s never explored. The villain easily could have done everything on his own, and is only less interesting because of this explanation.

But it’s even worse when you consider the political implications, and get to the reveal that the teddy bear AI was manipulating the President as well. It set up everything, going back to the war itself, because it somehow knew it would lead to the villain’s plan, which would lead to most of humanity dying so robots could take control. Again, this is already an unsatisfying, stupid reveal. But to take the fantastic commentary on a real-life war, and explain its origin with a nonsense rogue AI plot cheapens everything the story was saying. It could have challenged the true reasons behind the war, or something parallel to it. The evils of real life are evil enough without needing to fabricate a false one. Or, it could have just not included this at all, leaving it implicit, as the commentary would have worked fine without needing to explain everything. Some things are better left implicit than half-assed.

Perhaps the reason it went for the cartoonish explanation for war is that the more realistic, darker reasons would not have fit in a story tonally adjacent to Astro Boy. As I mentioned before, that’s what the final arc is — Pluto truly trying to be Astro Boy, rather than another Urasawa mystery. It does not do a bad job, but it fails to feel cohesive with what it had been before.

It’s in that recreation of Astro Boy, and Tezuka’s general bibliography, that Urasawa did truly accomplish something. For everything I think it retreads, and everything I think it fails to make interesting as an independent narrative, Pluto was never meant to be independent. It’s Urasawa revisiting his childhood, the childhood of his generation, and bringing it new life. I imagine it must be like going from Final Fantasy 7 to that game’s remake — taking something that was brisk, faster-paced, with more minimal dialogue, and filling in everything you had imagined in between as a child, to let you spend so much more time living with the characters.

And Urasawa doesn’t just bring to life the central Astro Boy arc. He draws from many Astro Boy stories and unrelated Tezuka manga, and does an astoundingly good job of weaving them together into a coherent narrative. It does not feel like the story takes breaks to tackle some other plot. It does not feel like a collection of disparate narratives, or like it makes out of place references. Pluto is as self-consistent and believable as if it had been entirely original, and I think someone would think it was, if they read it without knowing its origin story. Everything fits in the setting. I have to wonder if the reason Pluto feels so by-the-books and repetitive of Urasawa’s prior works is that he had his hands entirely full trying to make a hodgepodge tapestry feel cohesive at all. He succeeded.

But that reverence for the past is what bothers me about Urasawa’s style. His skills are undeniable, but he’s the ultimate boomer mangaka. He loves the good old days, the culture of his childhood. It’s not a bad thing to want to explore those themes — 20th Century Boys did something interesting with those ideas, by contrasting the dreams of his generation, growing up believing anything was possible, with modern cynicism. But as 20CB went on, its narrative developments grew unsatisfying and unearned, while its reverence for the magical power of rock and roll grew larger. Eventually, it just felt like it was idealizing that culture without purpose.

As talked about in a fantastic essay included in Pluto’s volumes, 20th Century Boys was telling men of Urasawa’s generation not to forget their dreams. Pluto is telling people a few things. Some of them are solid — anti-Iraq war, and some themes of robothood that are blatantly Asimovian but add a few interesting notes. But at its core, Pluto is Urasawa musing on how much he loves Tezuka. To the right people, that’s a good thing. The feat of tying so many Tezuka stories into a single narrative is, again, an impressive one. If anything similar exists in fiction as a whole, it’s certainly rare. But I’m hesitant to say that accomplishment actually makes Pluto a better story. To some, to those who grew up with Tezuka’s work, I’m sure it does. I can never read it from that perspective, and without it, the achievement does not detract, but it does not add either.

It’s not a bad thing for homage to exist in art, but this homage led to a story that felt blander than what Urasawa had written before, ripped between retreading his own work and retreading someone else’s. It might not have been possible for tributing Tezuka to have been done better than this, but I think the Tezuka tribute could have existed in a better story.

I’ve found it easier to respect Urasawa’s manga than to love them. Monster was technically well executed, but I found it hard to care about. 20th Century Boys hooked me, and had true potential that I wish it didn’t squander. It at least felt like Urasawa was still polishing his craft, and I almost love that manga, in spite of its failures. In Pluto, he stagnated. He fell back on old patterns so he could focus on recreating what someone else did, and ended up with something that didn’t do anything unique.