Welcome to the Weekly Comics Hype! I'm doing these alphabetically, but occasionally skipping around a bit. Today, I wanted to recommend Planetes by Makoto Yukimura, a visionary, realistic and atmospheric look at space travel in the near future.
Planetes is set in the year 2074 and is the story of a three-person crew of trash collectors. The space around our planet is full of small bits of orbiting debris which could cause catastrophes should a ship collide with any of it, so the crew's job is to kick the little bits of junk back towards Earth, so it can burn up in the atmosphere.
This premise provides the background for the stories about the crew and how they relate to the detailed and realistic work of space travel. Fee, the American pilot of the ship, wants principally to find a place to smoke. Hachi is trying to save enough money for a down payment on his own ship and recover from a near-breakdown caused when he was stranded outside in his pressure suit for several agonizing minutes. The tone is slow-paced and occasionally existential. The characters can't work in this environment without reflecting on how small humanity is, and wondering what our relationship to outer space is. It's a moody, quiet and beautiful title, and a compelling read because it's done very realistically, more so than most anything else in its genre. At its core, it's a character study, with the futuristic premise used for atmosphere and to give the characters' stories a kickstart.
The series ran for four years in the pages of Weekly Morning, though I'm not entirely sure in what format. There are 24 episodes of the comic, each about 40-50 pages, collected in five US editions. (The American version splits the double-length fourth Japanese edition into two.) I think that Weekly Morning ran a new episode every six or eight weeks or something, because there don't seem to be any breaks within the episodes for anything more than that. In 2003, a cartoon adaptation was produced by Sunrise; it ran for one season and is available on DVD in this country.
Volume one of Planetes is available from your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?
A special Weekly Comics Hype thank-you goes out to my LiveJournal buddy animejump for recommending this title!
Planetes is set in the year 2074 and is the story of a three-person crew of trash collectors. The space around our planet is full of small bits of orbiting debris which could cause catastrophes should a ship collide with any of it, so the crew's job is to kick the little bits of junk back towards Earth, so it can burn up in the atmosphere.
This premise provides the background for the stories about the crew and how they relate to the detailed and realistic work of space travel. Fee, the American pilot of the ship, wants principally to find a place to smoke. Hachi is trying to save enough money for a down payment on his own ship and recover from a near-breakdown caused when he was stranded outside in his pressure suit for several agonizing minutes. The tone is slow-paced and occasionally existential. The characters can't work in this environment without reflecting on how small humanity is, and wondering what our relationship to outer space is. It's a moody, quiet and beautiful title, and a compelling read because it's done very realistically, more so than most anything else in its genre. At its core, it's a character study, with the futuristic premise used for atmosphere and to give the characters' stories a kickstart.
The series ran for four years in the pages of Weekly Morning, though I'm not entirely sure in what format. There are 24 episodes of the comic, each about 40-50 pages, collected in five US editions. (The American version splits the double-length fourth Japanese edition into two.) I think that Weekly Morning ran a new episode every six or eight weeks or something, because there don't seem to be any breaks within the episodes for anything more than that. In 2003, a cartoon adaptation was produced by Sunrise; it ran for one season and is available on DVD in this country.
Volume one of Planetes is available from your local comic shop would enjoy your custom; new books ship on Wednesdays, so why not stop in after work?
A special Weekly Comics Hype thank-you goes out to my LiveJournal buddy animejump for recommending this title!