Pluto Urasawa X Tezuka vol 6 back

A rare spot of colour early on in the book makes for quite the startling statement. Aside from the first half a dozen pages, you rarely get colour in Japanese comics. Here it's a single, fiery red tulip in the dessert of Persia surrounded by all the other strains it has caused to wither and die. Care to guess what its creator called that bloom?

Meanwhile, in search of horticulturalist Sahad's connections to the Netherlands, Inspector Gesicht stumbles closer in his quest for answers even as the agent of death circles its prey.

Urusawa's revealed just enough at exactly the right time to have you on the edge of your seat, tantalising you with the remaining cast's proximity to destruction. He's also successfully established very early on how imperceptible the most sophisticated robots are from humans so that not only will an infant droid, crippled in the war and reduced to selling flowers, give you much pause for thought, but you're in for a bit of shock when someone you assumed was human turns out to be decidedly more artificial. Epsilon, the robot who refused to fight and who now instead looks after the orphans of the war, figures that out but fails to comprehend one of his charges' terror, and that'll have severe ramifications in book seven. But most importantly we finally begin to comprehend the awful truth behind the raging force of nature that is Pluto: what he is and who he was and how he came to be.