Dark Horse announce Planetes deluxe hardcover edition

Dark Horse have announced that Makoto Yukimura's popular sci-fi classic Planetes will receive a deluxe hardcover edition featuring front and back covers with a debossed effect for a tactile feel, with design cues taken from the International Space Station. 

The book will be printed in 7" x 10" format, with metallic gilding on the page edges and 44 pages of full colour art on high-gloss paper.

The book will be released on July 29th for an RRP of $49.99.

Synopsis (taken from the Dark Horse website):

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.