Gas People [Astro Boy] (Manga)

Astro Boy (1952-68), Chapter 002  ‘Gas People’ (気体人間), was originally serialized on a monthly schedule between May and October 1952 in Shonen.

What it’s about?

Weird things are happening when Astro’s friend Tamao starts going crazy stealing things from shop windows and passersby.  Another friend Ken has noticed Tamao’s behaviour when Tamao grabs him and pulls him into an alleyway to show him what he’s stolen.  Then he suddenly starts screaming in pain holding his head.  Ken takes him to Professor Ochanomizu who examines Tamao with a brain wave machine.  A strange vaporous mist comes out of Tamao’s head and the professor quickly sucks it up into a vacuum cleaner.  Tamao wakes up in a panic and says that mist told him to do those bad things and if he’d resisted he would have been killed.  Ochanomizu calls Astro and asks him to let the mist enter him so that they can safely analyze it.

Astro releases the gas in an isolated room and it enters his head. It tells him to go to a room in a huge building and he obeys smashing through the wall to the professor’s distress.  Then he walks all the way to the building and takes the elevator to the 44th floor and enters the room where eight people are gathered.  One of them speaks explaining that they have all been taken possession of by alien lifeforms composed entirely of gas particles.  The leader announces that they intend to conquer and enslave the people on earth.  One of the host bodies rebels saying he will never obey orders and is immediately killed as a warning to the others.

The leader sends Astro and one other person to the reservoir with instructions to contaminate Tokyo’s water supply with poisonous chemicals to make all the people very sick.  The only people at the reservoir are the man in charge and his very young daughter.  Astro initially assists in capturing them but he as a robot could never possibly be really possessed and has been pretending to find out what was going on.  He takes off his head and throws it at the possessed man knocking him out.  He uses the telephone to alert Professor Ochanomizu and gets the man and his little girl to seal the possessed victim in a glass case along with his head to trap the gas entities.  Then Astro goes outside and meets Mr. Mustachio and his robot parents.  They give him another head and Mustachio goes to the alien headquarters while Astro stays behind.

Meanwhile the man trapped in the glass persuades the reservoir overseer to open the lid a crack to let in some fresh air and the mist inside Astro’s previous head escapes and enters him instead.  Astro tries to stop him but he throws the poison into the water.  In desperation Astro breaks through the main pipe and plugs it up with a boulder.  A crowd of people arrive protesting against the obstruction of water and won’t believe Astro.  Egged on by the overseer they threaten to smash Astro while he stands resolute keeping the boulder in place and is about to be blasted with dynamite.  Just in time Professor Ochanomizu arrives with Astro’s friends Tamao and Ken.  They tell the horrified crowd that there really is poison in the water. Mustachio was able to succeed in infiltrating the gas people’s room and escape with a sample phial of the chemicals.  He captures the overseer just as he is about to pull the plunger on the explosives and Ochanomizu puts a poison antidote into the water so it can flow freely and harmlessly once more.

Then Ochanomizu uses the same brain wave equipment he used on young Tamao to safely drive the mist out of the poor man and trap it in the vacuum cleaner restoring him to his distressed daughter.  All the other gas people fled when the police raided their headquarters leaving their host bodies killing some of them even.  They vow however to return with massive reinforcements in twenty-four hours and possess everybody.

Ochanomizu comes up with a solution when he freezes the mist from the vacuum solid using a dry ice shatt to kill it. He devises a bomb version of it and has Astro fly with it up into the stratosphere at sunrise.  Astro explodes it just as the gas people try to descend to earth within a storm via the rainfall. The gas people are exterminated and fall to earth as harmless snow.