Astra Lost in Space Volume 2 continues the adventures of our nomadic Swiss Family Robinson as they piece together the staples of their necessarily alien diet from the fauna and flora of the planet Shummoor. Unlike many imaginary travelogues (e.g. Gulliver’s Travels), the mangaka brings the child heroes to planets devoid of sentient populations, so that the humor shifts downward in scale from satire to a broad physical comedy style that I can best call Pitfall with pratfalls, as the kids goof off with alien animals, plants, and fungi. Thankfully, this comedy is presented in a very natural way, and never becomes the actual subject of this story, but only the backdrop to an increasingly intriguing murder plot.
While much is made of the team-building aspect of this manga, the more sinister thrust of the narrative is that this is a family forged by crisis as one of the kids’ parents is suggested to be the villain of the series. This mystery centers around the new genome law that requires the inputting of all citizen DNA into a monstrous database, with the implication that the motive for their attempted murder was to prevent one (or more, as the mangaka sows many possible candidates for a bad seed among the parents) of the characters’ paternity from coming to light
While the plot backflips to bring this about, the story derives a weighty impact from choosing a parent for the villain of a coming of age / rite of passage story. Not only do the boys and girls become men and women in this narrative, they even become symbolic parents, parentalizing each other every chance that they get, and providing commentary, where appropriate, in a very meta way. If they were only helping each other, they would only be comrades in arms; because of the dramatizing of not just help, but the caregiving that the help is couched in, their interactions take on the characteristics of a family. That all of the characters seem to thrive in this family of peers is then validated by the sinister undertones of the villainy being disclosed in the parents’s story arc. Moreover, many of the parents that are not given a motive from the passing of the genome law are otherwise aloof or distinterrested in their children, so that even those kids whose parents aren’t trying to kill them may have a solid reason for feeling that their shipmates are more of a family. (There may even be a quasi-allegory being drawn here between a character’s pop star mother and the deadliest of the Shumoor lifeforms, the pole tree–which kills some things and nurtures others according to its own parentalizing whims–but as it is a very abstruse parallel, I’ll simply leave it here for your enjoyment.)
As in Volume 1, the most pleasurable thing about Astra is the creators’ interest in and development of believable alien lifeforms, not only animals, but plants, and in this installment, the fungi that steal the show. While the characters are stereotypes designed to riff off of already received shonen, YA, SF, and adventure tropes, the anonymous lifeforms of Astra have oodles of personality. In Volume 2, this imaginary field guide to Shumoor goes so far as to speculate on a life cycle in which the fungi are the dominant lifeform of the planet.
If you like well-drawn shonen manga or YA science fiction, you may enjoy Astra While these are characters that you’ve seen before, they are combined in a different way; while I can’t call it new and original, I can call it unfamiliar and unique. If this sounds like an unenthusiastic recommendation, I should like to clarify that I get very excited when the wondrous wildlife are trucked out for my perusal. If the worlds of Astra were presented in a “fictional non-fiction” pseudo-documentary style, I would enjoy it nearly as much, although I admit to being now somewhat invested in the mystery.
Astra Lost in Space Volume 2 is on shelves now, and you can also buy it through Viz Media.
Viz Media sent the review copy.