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!
