The characters and places of Astra: Lost in Space are almost allegorical: Aries Spring, Planet Camp, a girl with a bad attitude named Quitterie. The situations similarly seem grown from the special lights and nutrients of the shonen manga greenhouse, resulting in things we’ve seen before–the little sister who’s mainly a domesticated mascot and no doubt a budding McGuffin to drive a future volume; a classroom driven not by classes but a Peanuts-like narcissism that soon banishes adults from the narrative (if Schulz was interested less in Beethoven and baseball, and more in boobs and xeno-botany); the teen pecking order reduced to an alchemical formula of Alpha, Beta, and the Unknown quantity that refuses society; the cute heroine that sucks you into the narrative only to become a supporting character when the more banal protagonist is revealed.

When Astra starts as a team-building exercise on a planet, it isn’t so much that the narrative jumps the rails as that the fated rail-jumping happens at the expected time, to put a much-needed twist in the narrative. Flicked three months away and without adequate provisions for the return journey, the survival class becomes an actual struggle for survival. And here is where Astra finally comes alive and grabs the reader, for the plot of Astra is not nearly as alive as the manga’s alien life. Perhaps because the core of Astra is such a bland smoothie of pop science fiction tropes, the mangaka is able to juice up the narrative with surprisingly inventive alien fauna and flora you wouldn’t expect to see anywhere but in the darkest patches of Ringworld.

Astra‘s strength lies in its soft science fiction art, an aesthetic existing somewhere between Star Trek and Nickelodeon that makes everything not only attractive and appealing, but with such fascinating surfaces that surely some depth and darkness must lurk inside. Not that the writing is bad, not even in comparison to the art, but the premise and characters may be a Frankenstein of hurried trope-welding because the writer was more interested in animating the setting. At times, the depiction of Astra‘s bizarre worlds is so slick that the electrified narrative sticks to our memories and thoughts. It may not be the best manga fiction, but as fictified fact, we accept it and live it vicariously.

Astra: Lost in Space Volume 1 arrived in stores on October 24th, 2017. You can also buy it through Viz Media.

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Viz Media sent the review copy.