“A Stardust Sky,” the first chapter or “phase” of PLANETES Vol. 1, is one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read. Haunting, mournful, romantic, tense, funny… it’s a story so complete and so precise in its control of tone and mood that it’s bound to make you wonder if creator Makoto Yukimura can maintain that level of quality for the rest of the collection.
Yukimura can and does. Juxtaposing small, human stories against the vast, empty backdrop of space, PLANETES is utterly its own creation. It isn’t just a patchwork of genres like science fiction and drama and comedy. It somehow transcends those labels. There’s clearly a very humanist vision behind this manga, and it finds wonder wherever it looks.
It’s about orbital garbage collectors, snagging debris and derelict satellites from Earth’s orbit. The job is grueling and risky and unglamorous, but it’s vital. As Earth’s population expands outwards (partly in search of resources to replace the one’s they’ve depleted), space junk poses life-and-death risks. It’s grunt work, done in a setting that inspires awe.
On first glance, the crew sounds like a collection of stock characters: ambitious optimist Hachimaki, hard case Fee, and haunted veteran Yuri. But Yukimura makes them indelible. Hachimaki may be an optimist, but he’s having a hard time holding onto his illusions of wonder and adventure as he hauls jetsam. (He’s also accident prone.) Fee smokes and swears, but she cares about her work and her crew-mates (even if that means slapping them upside the head). Yuri has endured a horrible loss, and it defines him in many ways, but it doesn’t isolate him. In fact, he seems determined to strike a balance between honoring his memories while forging new connections.
The art is amazing. Even in black and white, Yukimura manages to convey the scope and wonder and texture of space. At the same time, he doesn’t prettify the conditions for the people who live there. (If there’s a weakness in the art, actually, it’s the people. I noticed some slight inconsistencies, and some individual characters are a little indistinct visually. But those are quibbles.)
To say anything specific about the plots would be to take away some of the sense of discovery. And, while its characters aren’t explorers, discovery is the defining theme of PLANETES. It’s just a quieter kind of discovery that takes you from the mundane to the majestic and everywhere in between.