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Wow that is some heavy-duty reading.

I havent finished yet but Mt Blanc, Molnar, Brondo and Hercules have been destroyed. You dont really see the deaths of the first three but Hercules puts up a monster fight. He loses his 'fighting' body (which only has his 'normal' body's head in it and when its destroyed.........................his normal body goes looking for his head....rejoins his normal body and he goes on to keep trying to break off one of Bruton's horns! Talk about tough.

I havent finished it yet but I found something very intriguing. Photar (Epsilon) is clearly the most powerful out of.....well.....everything. When Hercules goes off to try and find who killed Brondo it's Photar who sends him crashing back to earth in order to stop him committing quasi-suicide. But here's the thing. Photar can't fight! Even when Hercules is waiting on the mountain WITH Photar for Bruton they both acknowledge that it's Hercules' fight only, and even if he wanted to he couldn't.

This partly explains why he didnt fight in the big war and now looks after orphans. I'm not past Hercules' death yet so maybe Photar does get to strut his stuff later on, who knows. The closest he gets to fighting so far is when he forces himself to get away from a city because he's afraid of what he will do/destroy since he has just learned of the death of his master.

Anyway these pictures were pretty cool I thought.

Please feel free to spoil the ending or elaborate on anything I may have missed. It does have similarities to the 1980s version except Molnar's 'Master' is a real s.o.b until Molnar goes off to fight (his Master in this didnt build Molnar - he only hired him as a butler and frequently belittles him for being only a machine - in spite of Molnar wanting to know how to play piano).

Cheers guys, and yeah, like I said, feel free to tell me more.


P

Speaking of Photar, I believe his appearance was first seen in the 1980 Astro series. However it seems a prototype of his character did appear in the 1963 series, although the character itself was nothing like what became Photar.

This image is from the episode "The Robot Olympics" and the character was called Humbug in the ELV.

Wow, I always thought this was the 1960's Photar - or is this image from a comic?

Was that from the missing 89? Well in any event, it's interesting how Tezuka recycles his character designs.