ORB: ON THE MOVEMENTS OF THE EARTH 1-2
Writer/Artist: Uoto
Translator: Daniel Komen
Adaptation: Molly Tanzer
Lettering: Phil Christie
Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment
Publication Date: November 21, 2023
Rating: Older Teen
Genre: Historical, Drama
Orb: On the Movements of the Earth was published in the venerable Big Comic Spirits magazine from September 2020 to April 2022. It won the 26th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and a Seiun Award for Best Comic. None other than Hitoshi Iwaaki, the author of Parasyte and the as-of-yet untranslated Historie, praised Orb’s artist Uoto as an undeniable talent. An anime adaptation is coming courtesy of Madhouse, the studio behind Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. Now, Orb has been translated into English and published by Seven Seas. Manga readers may be asking at this point: is this the most sacred of texts, the certified Seven Seas banger? A book of the caliber of Witches or Robo Sapiens?
These curious readers must first make it through a uniquely gruesome introduction. In the opening pages, an inquisitor tears a man’s mouth open with a torture device called the pear of anguish. Later, in the fifteenth century, an inquisitor named Nowak rips out another man’s fingernail. When his victim shouts defiantly that he only has nine left, Nowak drops sixty-eight ripped fingernails onto the table. “They grow back, you know,” he says. The point is made. 
Those able to forge ahead will find a manga series about an unusual topic: heliocentrism. In the first part of the story, a young boy named Rafal meets a heretical astronomer named Hubert. Rafal is on course to become a happy, successful theologian. But Hubert inspires him to pursue his passion for astronomy and sets him on a collision course with Nowak, the inquisitor. In the second part, which takes place ten years later, two sellswords stumble across Rafal and Hubert’s hidden findings.
Despite its critical acclaim, Orb has real weaknesses. The character drawings are stiff and limited in expression. Uoto clearly enjoys drawing grotesque or deformed characters outside of the norm of manga but cannot do them justice on the page as of this first volume. The backgrounds are simple throughout. Besides a few cursory cityscapes and rocky outcroppings, this is a book of talking heads against blank spaces. The attention to detail present in A Bride’s Story and Vinland Saga are nowhere to be seen.
Orb’s paneling is also quite amateurish. Each page is chopped up in such a way that the size and length of each panel are arbitrary. Uoto is quite good when they go for a big swing, like the sky of eyeballs (see image below) that haunts the religious sellsword Oczy in the second part. The beats in between the big swings, though, need work. Orb’s panels aren’t dense enough in concept or detail to justify their lack of fluidity. I’m hardly the only one to point this out; Jacob Parker-Dalton said the same about this book in a 2021 Otaquest piece (RIP.)
What makes Orb worth reading, then? Well, this is a book about Big Ideas. The decades-long battle between science and faith. The thought process that leads scientists and philosophers to sacrifice their lives in pursuit of the Truth, with a capital T. The depravity perpetrated by the Church to keep the world small and base so that it is easy to control. The characters pursue these ideas with the kind of fire you see in Shonen Jump manga, except that there is no guarantee of friendship or victory. The protagonist of Orb is not the young astronomer Rafal but heliocentrism itself. Everybody else is expendable in pursuit of the dream.
Orb has its share of scenes in which the cast explains scientific principles to the reader. These scenes justify the book’s existence as an educational object. The real throughline, though, is science’s aesthetic beauty. Hubert says to Rafal early in his story, “I don’t want to live in a universe that is not beautiful.” Heliocentrism transforms a seemingly chaotic and unpredictable universe into one in which life is worthwhile. There’s an incredible scene late in the book where Oczy realizes that the stars he feared to be the judgemental eyes of God are instead a natural phenomenon. Individual resolve becomes scientific inquiry and back again.
Uoto, at 24, was the youngest manga artist to win the Tezuka Osamu Grand Prize. This would mean they were just 22 when the comic began. Orb isn’t Uoto’s first published series–that would be the five-volume sports comic Hyaku M, but its story is told with a distinctly youthful passion. It reminds me of Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan, which overcame its stiff character designs with sheer bravado. Orb lacks Titan‘s action but shares a distaste for authority and hypocrisy.
This single-minded focus has its attendant weaknesses, as well. There are no women in the first two volumes of Orb. Oczy’s colleague Gras once had a wife and child, but it doesn’t shape his behavior beyond banal cliches. Uoto also has a habit of resorting to convenience to keep the story moving. Hubert only changes Rafal’s life because Rafal’s adopted father, Potocki, requests that they meet. If Potocki knew that Hubert was a dyed-in-the-wool astronomer, wouldn’t he keep Rafal away from him at all costs? In another fascinating example, historians say that the pear of anguish utilized in the opening pages of Orb was never actually used to torture people, much less in the middle ages. This has me curious about how “historically accurate” Orb really is.
At the end of the day, I’ll have to read another volume or two of Orb to know whether Uoto improves as an artist and a storyteller. But anybody curious about the book ought to seek it out. This is a big story told with gusto, even if the technique is shaky. Its themes remain depressingly relevant, considering that book banning and religious conservatism still endanger people across the United States as well as the rest of the world. Here’s hoping for future volumes in English so that I might learn if Uoto lives up to Hiroshi Iwaaki’s high expectations.
Orb: On the Movements of the Earth 1-2 is currently available from Seven Seas in a collected omnibus volume.
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