Meet Astro Boy in the official trailer for the Pluto anime on Netflix

Get a sneak peek at Pluto, a new eight-episode anime series coming to Netflix on Oct. 27 — an international murder mystery in a world of noble robots and flawed humanity, based on the manga by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki.

The idea that one of America’s best contemporary creators would revisit the comics of an old master is baked right into American comics. But in Japan’s comics tradition, such things are quite a bit more singular. Pluto is inarguably perched atop those efforts, as a retelling of the Astro Boy story “The Greatest Robot on Earth,” by Osamu Tezuka, the “Father of Manga.”

The story revolves around the international robot detective Inspector Gesicht, who is tasked with finding the killer of the robots and robot advocates most widely known in the world. But in a broader way, Urasawa touches on humanity’s capacity for war and prejudice, and the tragedy of creating thinking robots to be our heroes and our weapons simultaneously — something pretty close to the heart of anyone who grew up on Tezuka’s widely read and superlatively influential Astro Boy.

Netflix’s adaptation is a real whopper, consisting of eight hour-long episodes, the same number as there are volumes in the manga itself. This will be available on the streaming service starting Thursday, 26th October.