Astro Boy, Volume 3

This volume of Astro Boy collects two stories, The Greatest Robot on Eart, and Mad Machine.
This is another book i picked up at the baltimore comic convention, I get loads of Astro Boy books for dirt cheap at conventions, I almost have all 18!

The Greatest robot on earth centers on the killing of the World's 7 greatest robots, who are

Mont Blanc, the "mountain guide robot, pride of Switzerland, with 100,000 horsepower"

North #2, the six armed Robot from Scotland,

Brando, "the top robot wrestler in all of Turkey",

Gerhardt, A robot inspector from Germany, made of a nigh indestructible metal called "Zeronium",

Hercules, the honor bound robot from Greece,

Epsilon, a powerful Australian Robot fueled by Photon energy,

and last but not least Japan's own Astro(who is the only one not killed).

The robot responsible is Pluto, a horned robot built by an evil man to become the best robot and rule the world. All of the seven robots are fairly interesting characters, but most of the fights with Pluto seem to be in Pluto's favor for the most part. Pluto is an interesting character, for even though he is certainly doing terrible things, depriving the world of these great robots, and essentially "murdering" them, he has no choice for that was why he was created. He shows signs of honor and even develops a friendship with Astro and his sister, Uran. Dr. Tenma, Astro's mysterious creator returns and gives Astro 1,000,000 horsepower to confront Pluto, but circumstances intervene and a mysterious new robot enters the fray...

This story was very entertaining, kind of a classic action manga scenario. A good way to introduce lots of cool robots, with interesting powers, and have nice action scenes. This story is also the basis of a spinoff manga, by the excellent Manga-Ka, Naoki Urasawa, called PLUTO. That centers around Gerhardt, investigating the murders of the robots by the until then unknown Pluto. I hope it gets released here.
The second story is called "Mad Machine" in which a crazy doctor makes a machine that drives all robots mad, jumping around causing a general ruckus. It is fairly short, and a little more light hearted than the Pluto story. I think the Mad Machine was used as a basis for some of the plot in the Tezuka based animated film Metropolis.
If you like Tezuka, and Astro Boy, this is an excellent Volume to pick up.