The students of Carid High School is excited for their pre-school trip to planet camp! It’s a tradition for new students to be split into small random groups and be sent to Planet McPa for a few days to get to know each other and get used to the greater responsibilities they’ll have in high school. The trip seems like it might be a bit rocky based on the wildly different characters in the group.
But within minutes, the trip takes a turn for the deadly when a mysterious glowing orb appears and sucks up the group. The group pops out somewhere in outer space, around a planet that they don’t recognize, and if there wasn’t an old, abandoned spaceship floating nearby this trip would have turned deadly fast.
As it stands, the kids aren’t in the clear yet. They’re over 5,000 light years away from home, the ship is missing crucial components in its communication system, and even if the ship’s reserves were full of food it wouldn’t be enough to get them even a third of the way home. So the kids hatch a plan: take the scenic route back home instead, stopping on different planets to refill their supplies and, in some ways, to have the camping trip they were denied.
I suppose that my biggest complaint about Astra Lost in Space is that, at just under 50 chapters (five complete volumes), it feels too short! Five volumes is on the shorter end for a series but I also experienced this as it was being simultaneously published by Viz week to week, which is a very different experience than reading a volume every few months (or even reading a webcomic update page by page). The story didn’t feel compressed or cut short but I was surprised at how easily some of the larger mysteries of it were resolved at the very end (these felt like planned surprises though, not something that Kenta Shinohara pulled together at the last minute). I had thought that the story would have drawn them out more for maximum suspense (and I do think that method would have worked) but instead Astra Lost in Space opts for an almost anti-climatic sit-down talk as the characters put the final pieces together for how and why their adventure happened. I would have also liked the story to go on a little longer so as to flesh out the characters a bit more. Everyone did have small, solo arcs where they grew and became more open with their classmates, but I felt like the characterization could have gone even farther and made the characters feel more like real people instead of, well, manga characters.
Speaking of characters, one of the kids is revealed to be genderqueer partway through the series. While it was certainly surprising, I thought that the story handled it pretty well. They’re intersex, meaning that they have both male and female biological characteristics, and while they currently identify with their gender assigned at birth, they aren’t sure if they always will. Hence the term “genderqueer;” this reveal is a plot point but after it the other characters don’t treat them any differently and it’s not brought up very often. This is a part of the character but it isn’t their sole defining characteristic, which is what you ideally want to do with any queer character. I am totally fine that this story has a queer character without being in any large part about queer issues. It’s important to have queer characters in “normal” stories, and the fact that we see the rest of the cast continue on without too much surprise is, I think, an important thing as well! Plus, apparently in the future it’s an option everywhere to list your gender as nonbinary on documents which is pretty neat since you can’t do that in many places currently!
Overall, Astra Lost in Space is a fun adventure series with a great cast and a surprisingly well-thought out plot holding everything together. As I’ve been rereading it I’ve been struck by how much foreshadowing there was to back up the eventual resolutions of the series’ mysteries and twists and that was not something I expected going into this work! After this series I am sure to keep an eye out for Shinohara’s next manga and maybe I’ll find the time to give his earlier work, Sket Dance, a shot as well!