Planetes Deluxe Edition Book 2 - Hardcover

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

From manga icon Makoto Yukimura, the creator of Vinland Saga!

It's 2078, and eighteen astronauts represent all humanity on its first voyage to Jupiter. And their humanity is more precious than the treasure they seek.

Hachimaki is determined to break free of Earth's gravity well by joining the crew of the fusion-powered Von Braun on its epic first crewed journey 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 it isn't only worlds whose paths are made by unseen orbits through time and space...it's people, and Hachimaki must confront the tension of tightening his human bonds to Earth through marriage, even as he seeks the far frontier--just as his old captain, Fee Carmichael, must seek that invisible balance of forces with the past, present, and future generations of her own earthbound family. And if Fee and crewmates Yuri and Tanabe aboard the space junk removal ship Toy Box can't stop the long-feared Kessler Syndrome as a war in space threatens to spin out of control and fill orbit with an inescapable cloud of debris, humanity may never journey beyond Earth again! Planetes is an epic saga of family, friendship, and passion in a future not far away!

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!

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.

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.