The year is 2025, the older brother decides to trust himself just one last time. It's the start of an adventure that aims for Mars via JAXA in the town of Tsukuba! The official Space Brothers manga is ready to launch! Two brothers looked to the starry skies as children and made a promise. And now, in the year 2025, the younger brother, Hibito, is carrying out his promise. He is an astronaut who has been selected as a crew member for mankind's first long-term base on the moon. Meanwhile, the older brother, Mutta, has just been fired from his job and is unemployed. A text message from Hibito sends him applying to be an astronaut and shooting for the stars!
Chūya Koyama (小山宙哉) is a Japanese writer, best known for his Space Brothers series, published regularly since 2007.
On 2 November 2016 his artwork was carried into space by the H-IIA rocket carrying the Himawari-9 weather satellite as part of an outreach project organized by the Young Astronauts Club Japan
Thrilling volume....started with happy tears be seeing selection of new Astronauts for training and gives a glimpse of the adventure of Hibito on Moon....last chapter is a breath-taking read :)
While I can't think of any particular reason for liking this one less than the rest, for some reason I was starting to lose interest at this point. Luckily the next book after this one was great.
Make sure you have Vol. 9 before you finish this one--the last few chapters are pretty tense and it ends with a cliffhanger!
There's a big milestone in this entry and Koyama pulls it off beautifully. So many great uplifting moments. I loved spending time with all the candidates again, and I laughed out loud multiple times. I also really appreciate the inherent optimism in the story. Some characters whose first impression was negative show good growth that gives me hope for humankind.
I love how Koyama keeps seeding visual parallels in the brothers' storylines, and how much time Mutta spends in introspection. It scratches my literary itch. And there's a lot of fun information to scratch my science itch too. Great volume overall.
Cultural and Language notes: I love that Serika's grandparents speak with a Kansai accent. Also when her mother greets them, the hiragana says "mother, father" but the kanji is that for mother-in-law & father-in-law.
h.o.l.y.c.r.a.p. What a volume! From beginning to end, this was stuffed full of greatness - to my favorite characters finally being selected as astronauts to Hibito finally landing on the moon and encountering some scary real-life stuff... I'm honestly on the edge of my seat. Also, the art is absolutely first-rate. Swoon.