Planetes Deluxe Edition Book 1 - Hardcover

by Makoto Yukimura (Author), Makoto Yukimura (Illustrator), Yuki Johnson (Translator)

The first of two deluxe editions collecting the sci-fi classic by manga icon Makoto Yukimura, the creator of Vinland Saga!

Winner - Best Publication Design, 2025 American Manga Awards!

It's the late 21st century. People now live on the Moon and Mars, and for some, space is still an epic adventure, as plans are underway for the first-ever crewed voyage to Jupiter. If the giant planet can be successfully reached and harvested for the helium-3 fuel in its atmosphere, the entire solar system will open up to humanity!

But much of the time, space is an everyday job...and an unglamorous and dangerous one--done by astronauts like Hachimaki "Hachi" Hoshino, Fee Carmichael, and Yuri Mikhalkov, as they orbit the Earth in the ramshackle vessel DS-12 Toy Box. Their task is helping to clean up the mess human beings have brought along with them into space--over a hundred years of debris circling the world at eight kilometers per second, posing a deadly threat to travelers.

Hachi, son of a famous pioneer of Mars voyages, dreams of breaking out from his father Goro's shadow by joining the Jupiter mission, but a traumatic brush with death may have used up Hachi's courage to journey further. Fee, no-nonsense pilot of the Toy Box and working mom, is lauded as a heroine for preventing a terrorist incident in space, but faces an even tougher challenge as an astronaut--finding a place where she can smoke! And Yuri, the ever calm and reliable crewmate on the team, deals with the loss of his wife in a tragic accident while grappling with the true meaning of humanity's place among the stars.

Deluxe Edition features:

• Front and back covers feature debossed patterns with tactile effect.
• Metallic copper gilding on page edges.
• 7" x 10" hardback on high-quality paper.
• 44 full-color art pages on special gloss stock.
• Book design pays tribute to real astronauts; inspired by elements of the International Space Station.

Planetes is the ancient Greek word for "wanderers"--describing both the planets themselves, and the restless protagonists who dream of reaching those distant worlds against an epic backdrop of family, romance, politics, ambition, and war in creator Makoto Yukimura's saga of the human drama of space exploration!

Author Biography

Makoto Yukimura was born in 1976 in Yokohama, Japan, and was first inspired by the idea of drawing manga in elementary school, when he encountered Buronson and Tetsuo Hara's famous Fist of the North Star. While attending college, Yukimura learned manga technique and storytelling by working as an assistant to artist Shin Morimura, a onetime collaborator with Garon Tsuchiya (Oldboy).

Planetes was Makoto Yukimura's professional debut at age 22; before being collected to graphic novel, the story was serialized in Kodansha's prestigious weekly manga magazine Comic Morning, also home to What's Michael? as well as titles such as Vagabond and Drops of God. Both the manga and anime adaptation of Planetes won Japan's Seiun Award for science fiction, a feat that had not been achieved since Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

In 2005, Yukimura began his ongoing manga epic Vinland Saga, published in English by Kodansha, which in 2009 would be awarded the Grand Prize for Manga by the Japan Media Arts Festival, an official event of the national Agency for Cultural Affairs. Vinland Saga has been adapted into a two-season anime series streaming on Amazon and Netflix, winning the 4th Crunchyroll Anime Awards for Best Drama in 2020.