Unico: Awakening | Review

Unico: Awakening
Writer: Samuel Sattin
Artists: Gurihiru
Scholastic; $12.99

It takes an awful lot of guts—one might even say audacity—to attempt to remake a comic by Osamu Tezuka. The late artist not only produced over 150,000 pages of manga and created a string of legendary characters including Astro Boy, Black Jack and Jungle Emperor Leo, but he was also the single most influential creator in the popularization of Japanese manga and anime in the 20th century. I mean, they don’t call him “the God of Manga” for nothing.

And yet the creative team of writer Samuel Sattin (a writer of comics and prose whose credits include A Kid’s Guide to Anime & Manga and The Essential Anime Guide) and the prolific art team known as Gurihiru (Superman Smashes the Klan, some Avatar: The Last Airbender comics and plenty of work for Marvel) acquit themselves quite admirably with Unico: Awakening, a modernized retelling of a couple of stories from Tezuka’s Unico manga, which originally ran from 1976 to 1979 and inspired a pair of animated films in the 1980s.

The core of Unico: Awakening is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Tezuka story “The Cat on the Broomstick,” in which the little unicorn meets an abandoned pet cat, uses his magic to turn her into a human in order to befriend and help a kind old destitute lady, and must eventually save the animals of a nearby forest from a cruel hunter. (You can find it in the Kickstarter-ed collection of Tezuka’s originals that Digital Manga Publishing produced in 2013; it’s definitely worth comparing and contrasting with Awakening.)

To that backbone of story Sattin and Gurihiru connect Unico’s origins, in which the jealous goddess Venus has the West Wind abduct him from his happy home with Psyche in ancient Greece and commands her to leave him on the Hill of Oblivion. Instead, the wind takes pity on the innocent unicorn and takes him to somewhere else in time and space for a while…then, when his latest episodic adventure is over, she recaptures him and takes him to a new setting, wiping his memory in the process. This provides the series with its premise—same star, different adventure in each story.

In Awakening, which implies Unico has had many other adventures of this sort without necessarily depicting them all, the intervention of Venus in the story is played as a sort of constant, with her two servant winds—the good Zephyrus, or the West Wind, and the not-so-good Night Wind—involved in the goddess of beauty’s ongoing machinations against Unico…and an attempt by the Zephyrus to save him from his doomed cycle of new adventure and amnesia that she inadvertently doomed him to. Venus is here an ever-present villain, the action regularly shifting back to her and her servants, and the climax involving a direct confrontation between her and Unico (the hunter is shown to be possessed by Venus, who encourages his crueler instincts).

The main difference between the original story and the retelling, aside from the use of Unico’s origins as ongoing plot points, is that Sattin and Gurihiru have updated the setting to a modern one—not merely transferring the timeless, Grimm’s fairy tale-like setting of the original to Tezuka’s own time, but setting it in the year 2024 or so.

The storytelling is also much more modern, the creators using far fewer panels per page than Tezuka did, for a more streamlined (some might say more sophisticated) reading experience, excising Tezuka’s many physical gags and cartoonier asides.

While Unico looks much as you would expect him to if you’ve read his original manga or seen any of his cartoons, Gurihiru does make him their own, and there’s a page among the backmatter that compares Tezuka’s original designs with those of Gurihiru, at least for Unico, Venus, and the cat who becomes a girl, Chow/Chloe. There you can see the subtle changes they made to the protagonist, and the rather dramatic ones made to the antagonist, who is now no longer a generic Greek goddess in a toga, but rather alien-looking, devoid of facial features save for a pair of cruel, pupil-less eyes (that’s her in red at the top of the cover).

Gurihiru then—quite wisely I think—doesn’t attempt to ape Tezuka’s own Disney-inspired, detail-oriented, cartoony style, but instead draws in their own style, simply taking design cues from the great artist’s work, particularly on the title character who, after all, has to look an awful lot like Tezuka’s Unico in order to be Unico. This works quite well, especially since the Gurihiru team is among the best artists drawing comics for the North American market at the moment.

While no substitute for Tezuka’s own work, Unico: Awakening is nevertheless a faithful updating of one of his many compelling characters and storylines, one that stands perfectly well on its own, while also providing a possible springboard into the work of one of comics history’s greatest practitioners. The back matter includes a short biography of Tezuka and of Unico’s real-world history. (It’s just too bad the aforementioned Unico manga collection is now out-of-print; maybe Scholastic should see about rectifying that situation, if they’re going to be producing more, original-ish Unico content?)

Fans seem to have already overwhelmingly embraced the new Unico…or at least the prospect of it. Tezuka Productions, Sattin, and Gurihiru originally announced the project as a Kickstarter in 2022 and found it fully funded within 24 hours. By fall of 2023, Scholastic became involved as publisher. Since then, a second volume, Unico: Hunted, has already been announced.

From the finished results, it definitely seems to have been a project well worth backing.

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