Let's open our newest manga sampling with a confession: though I'd seen it recommended by more than one web critic, it took several weeks before I bought - and even more weeks before I read - Makuto Yukimura's Planetes (Tokyopop). All the reviews I'd read had been unstinting in their praise of this s-f manga series, but each one contained a term that gave me pause: "hard science." I know it was being used positively - to differentiate Planetes from all the goofy pseudo-science used to prop giant robot comics - but to me the phrase connotes the 100% nuts-&-bolts/0% characterization plotting of early "scientifiction." Something like the Robert Heinlein-scripted movie 1950 Destination Moon, say, which was praised in its day for its "scientific accuracy" but fatally ignored drama in favor of nuance-free hardware fetishizing.
Looking at the cover to Volume One - a spacesuit-enshrouded figure quietly floating in space, frowning at the reader - didn't alleviate my forebodings. Then I actually started reading Yukimura's series and, big surprise, I was totally wrong.
Planetes opens with a four-page color prologue, though the rest of the volume is in the more familiar black-and-white. Set in the year 2068, the sequence shows Russian-born astronaut Yuri and his wife shuttling through space on a Commercial Travel Liner taking them back to Earth. Tragedy strikes when the ship runs into a debris storm, though we're not sure initially what's supposed to be happening. All we can see is that the window alongside the nervous spouse's seat has suddenly started cracking, then the artist backs off into a long shot of the ship breaking up. Next thing we know, it's six years later and we're on an outer space debris hauler staffed by a trio of Extra-Planetary Sanitation Workers.
Among this threesome is Yuri, who has survived the shuttle crash and spends his non-work time scanning space and looking for a compass that belonged to his missing wife. Also on board is Fee, a tomboyish chain-smoking Floridian, and Hachimaki Hoshino, the youngest of the crew. Hachi is the series' primary focal point (though both Fee and Yuri get their moments in the first volume): the son of a famous astronaut, he dreams of exploring space himself, though he's presently stuck in his job as outer space garbageman. Collecting space junk, the detritus from years of abandoned satellites and other manmade intrusions into space, turns out to be an essential task. "If any of this stuff was to hit a spacecraft," Hachi notes at one point, "well, it wouldn't be pretty." It's risky, but it's also decidedly unglamorous.
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