Hello everyone, it is time once again for another manga review from yours’ truly. Today, I will be looking at Hiroya Oku’s successful seinen series, Gantz. Gantz begins by introducing us to one of the series’ main protagonists, Kei Kurono, a perverted, pessimistic 10th grader on his way home for the day. Kei is at the subway station waiting for his train to arrive, when a former childhood friend of his, named Masaru Kato appears next to him. Kato is the other main protagonist of Gantz. Without warning, an overly drunk hobo falls onto the subway tracks and at first no one is willing to help him, especially Kei, who seems pretty excited at the prospect of seeing someone getting ran over by a subway train. However, Kato climbs down onto the track to help the hobo and begins asking for others to help him carrying the man, but once more, no one seems to care. That is, until Kato notices Kei in the crowd and calls out his name, making everyone else on the platform stare at Kei waiting for his response. Kei reluctantly climbs down onto the tracks to join Kato, and they begin lifting the hobo up when the PA system announces the next train is arriving shortly. Kei and Kato manage to throw the hobo onto the platform and begin to climb onto the platform themselves when the train comes into sight. Running out of time, Kei and Kato try to outrun the train, because it has to come to a stop at the platform, giving them a chance to escape. The only problem is, the train is a no-stop express train, meaning they are doomed.
You know, in hindsight....
Kei and Kato are seemingly killed in gruesome fashion, but the next thing they know, they find themselves in a small apartment in Tokyo with a group of other people who were also on the brink of death. One of these people is a middle school student named Nishi. There is also one other thing of note in the apartment, a giant black sphere. The mysterious sphere begins playing the opening jingle to a popular Japanese morning radio exercise program.
Suddenly, the message, “Your lives have ended. How you use your new lives is entirely up to me. That’s the theory, anyways.” appears on the face of the sphere. A picture of a weird looking person then appears on the sphere, along with various information about them. The sphere calls the person the Onion Alien. The Onion Alien oddly looks like the love child of Bart Simpson and Barry Pepper.
The sphere opens up to reveal an arsenal of futuristic looking guns, as well as a naked man sitting inside the sphere, this man and by proxy, the sphere, would later on be called Gantz by Nishi. Also inside Gantz are cases with everyone’s names on them. Inside each case is a skin tight black suit custom made to fit the naked body of the person who had their name on that case. These suits give the wearer vastly increased speed, strength, agility, jumping height, as well as heightened durability and resistance to damage. However, if the suit takes too much damage, it loses all of these abilities. Because the suits look really stupid, the only person who willingly puts on his suit is Kei, because he noticed Nishi was already wearing his suit underneath his clothes. After loading up on weapons, Gantz teleports the people from inside the apartment to a Tokyo suburb. Most of the people split off from Kei and Kato to look for the Onion Alien, and they find it, however the Onion Alien they find turns out to be just a young one. After they kill the Onion Alien, its father appears, and to say he was pissed would be an understatement.
Understatement
The adult Onion Alien proceeds to kick the ass of pretty much everyone, until Kei activates his suit’s abilities and helps Nishi capture the adult Onion Alien. With the young one dead and the adult one captured, their mission is completed, and Gantz teleports all of the survivors back to the apartment. Gantz then gives each of the survivors points based on how they did in the mission, and then allows them to leave the apartment. Throughout the rest of the series, the characters go on several more alien hunts like these, where they have to fight aliens that look like a wide variety of things from dinosaurs to Ring Wraiths. There is a very large cast of characters to Gantz, and that is mainly due to the fact that Hiroya Oku goes through Gantz team members like the USS Enterprise goes through red shirts.
Being a seinen series, there is copious amounts of both gore and nudity in this manga, so it is very strongly not safe for work. In regards to the length of the series, it is still currently on going and it has 345 chapters and 31 volumes to date. The series has also spawned a 26 episode long anime series and two live action films in Japan. Dark Horse has the license to the series in North America, and are currently releasing the volumes.
Gantz is an odd title that I would not suggest to those that have weak stomachs, but if you can withstand very violent imagery, you should check the series out. You can support the official Dark Horse release by buying the volumes at the following website. http://www.darkhorse.com/Search/Browse/Gantz/PpwNwkt8
