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Astro Boy fans, rejoice! In October, Titan Comics and Stonebot Studios will release the first translated volume of Osamu Tezuka's Atom: The Beginning, and will quickly follow up with volume 2 in December. The manga follows two robotic engineering students who create the wildly powerful A106, AKA Six, and who will eventually go on to create the artificial intelligence that gives birth to Astro Boy's Atom.
Queue the nostalgia.
Atom has seen several incarnations, beginning in Tezuka's original manga, Mighty Atom, which was serialized from 1952 to 1968 and later collected in one volume; Dark Horse Comics published a translated version in 2002.
The Mighty Atom/Astro Boy manga was adapted into an anime series that debuted in 1963 and became the first anime to be broadcast overseas. It was translated into English and aired 104 episodes between 1963 and 1965, and it was later remade in the 1980s as New Mighty Atom. Then, in 2003, the anime was remade again as Astro Boy: Mighty Atom.
In 1988, Konami developed and published the Mighty Atom video game for the Nintendo Famicom, becoming the first studio to release a video game adaptation of the classic title. Astro has since appeared in six additional video games from various publishers, including a digital card game that was released as free-to-play on Steam in 2017, then shut down a year later.
Most recently, Atom appeared as a playable character in the crossover puzzle game Crystal Crisis for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
Atom: The Beginning explores this iconic character's actual creators, and the English release has been a long time coming. The manga was written and illustrated by Tetsuro Kasahara, with contributions by Masami Yuki and Makoto Tezuka; the latter is the son of Astro Boy's creator, Osamu Tezuka, who's not just credited with helping to establish Japan's comics industry, but is widely regarded as 'The Godfather of Manga.'
Take a look at the preview pages for Atom: The Beginning Volumes 1 and Volume 2 below:
Atom: The Beginning Volume 1 will be released in October, with volume 2 following in December.
It may not have been created by Tezuka, but magical girl manga has a truly transformative legacy.
