Hiroya Oku

This is for the whole thing. I have no idea what people are talking about. This was recommended on a youtube video from a thirty year old adult, calling it well written. Come on, bro. This is not even well written camp. The problem is that the mangaka writes a story through the gaze of evil and despite of it, giving really lazy, cheap shots of drama and romance that are so terrible you start to wonder if this guy's ever talked to another human being in his life. You can't tell a story like that, usually evil is the abcense of good where your characters iluminate their way through the plot. In Gantz evil is the substance and everybody is swimming in it, and there is a glimpse of light here and there when a characters falls in love (usually out of nowhere) or starts crying because everything is so hopeless. The problem is that because everybody is so cynically written and the world they live in they don't behave like human beings, they behave like disposible secondary characters in a bad soap opera, you just can't care, and the mangaka puts himself in these melodramatic dead ends. At the end there is some new atheism philosophy, sprinkled with the religious theory of metempsychosis, the horrors of war, and the deep longing for your father's validation (I swear to God) and everything is so cheap, lazy and done in such bad taste that you can't take it seriously or make fun of it. It's just bad. The action scenes and alien designs are cool, I guess, when you understand what the hell is happening, the pages are so busy sometimes that it looks like a big ink stain.… (more)

After a false start ten years ago reading the first dozen volumes, I've finally finished Gantz, reading all 37 volumes in the thick, 12-book omnibus format. It's quite the thrill ride, with gallons of gore, loads of shocks, and a whole hell of a lot of nudity.

Alas, once the story abandons the gaming concept of the early volumes, it goes off the rails. As Speed taught us when they got off the bus and The Hunger Games confirmed when they broke out of the arena, leaving a strong initial concept behind can be a huge mistake for an action epic.

The first half of this volume devolves into hard to follow giant robot battles with aliens, has a brief talking-head interlude with some other aliens to explain the whole plot of the series, and then goes back to the first aliens for a final battle of the champions with winner-takes-all stakes.

The creator reveals in the afterword that the whole series -- and especially the ending -- is a tribute to some anime I never heard of called Invincible Super Man Zambot 3. To me it just felt like an exercise in Mary Sue storytelling with a naturally-talented protagonist who keeps leveling up in time to face ever-increasing threats. It's all fun until you get to the end, and then it all feels rather pointless.

It's still a pretty fun ride until the fizzle though.… (more)

I feel like I just got rickrolled. I started out reading Gantz, but I ended up reading Manfried the Man. Wild.

The final phase of the series brings epic destruction to the world. And as it burns, the Gantz team is basically tossing teaspoons of water at the conflagration, trying to make a difference but making little progress.

Everything is so over the top now -- especially Tae's odyssey -- that I can only laugh and go along for the ride. The roller coaster has left the rails but it's going to do some loop-de-loops and barrel rolls before it plows into the ground.… (more)