Gantz vol. 36

It’s the penultimate volume of this series, and mangaka Hiroya Oku decides to oblige the readers who have been following it for so long with some answers.  To his credit, they’re actually fairly interesting ones that explain some of the nonsense that has come before and play against your expectations.  Vol. 37 starts off on the alien mothership that has now been commandeered by the Gantz fighters.  Now at the mercy of the humans, the aliens wind up getting some frankly abhorrent treatment by their captors.  You might have some time to think that Oku is making some kind of allegorical statement about real-life war crimes, but this just turns out to be window dressing before the team led by Kei and Kurono winds up in the Room of Truth (no, really) and get an explanation as to why they’ve been fighting all this time.

Bizarre as anything else in this series, the Room of Truth is cube-shaped and is home to an upright humanoid figure with constantly shifting heads seen through its open chest and cranial cavities.  It’s a great design for suggesting an intelligence which is emphatically Not Like Us and makes for one of the more unique bits of talking heads exposition I’ve ever seen.  I won’t spoil the answers it gives, safe to say that they were the source of the Gantz technology and that weird digression involving the journalist Kikuchi’s trip to Germany back in vol. 27 is properly explained.  The humans are appropriately grateful for these aliens’ intervention, and that’s when things take a turn…

You see, the aliens are rather indifferent to the humans’ words of thanks and go on to say a few choice words about humanity’s place in the universe.  Statements about how their lives are no more different than ants, that their gods do not exist, and that the destruction of Earth would only be significant in how it changes the arrangement of matter are made.  Our protagonists regard these as fightin’ words and proceed to launch into the usual tirades you see in sci-fi about how human life has meaning and how we’re able to appreciate art, create stuff, LOVE and all that stuff.  I wasn’t all that impressed to see Oku break out these particular tropes, until he gave us the aliens’ rebuttal.

To prove their point, the aliens resurrect four deceased members of the supporting cast:  Reika, Kishimoto, That Old Guy, and The Girl Who Looks Like Lara Croft.  These aren’t clones as it’s made immediately clear that they have all of their memories up to the point of their deaths and are appropriately grateful to see some familiar faces.  Awkwardly so in the case of Kei, Reika and TGWHLLLC.  It’s a heartwarming moment in a series not known for them, but ultimately a brutal one in the way that it’s cut short.  This leads to one of the core cast sacrificing themselves in a futile gesture of rage, which is followed by the aliens’ answer regarding the fate of the human soul.

I actually really liked this whole sequence because of the way it gives the middle finger to a particularly tired set of sci-fi tropes.  How many times have humans saved the Earth in fiction by proclaiming that our abilities to love and create make us special?  Too damn many times to count, that’s how many!  The rebuttal issued by Oku here may strike some as cynical, but it makes sense coming from aliens who have command over life and death itself.  In the world of “Gantz,” the only reason humanity has survived is because some aliens flipped a coin to determine whether or not they would help out.  It’s a fate that feels appropriate for a series that has taken pride in not showing humanity at its best over the course of its run.

That, however, was the interesting part of this volume.  What follows is more fighting against the last vestiges of the giant alien forces as the humans work with the last functioning Gantz orb to get back to Earth.  The fighting takes the form of a series of one-on-one matches (because reasons, I guess) and is as solidly executed as you’d expect it to be from this title.  With all of the mysteries of this series accounted for, it would appear that the only thing left is the fighting.  I can’t say that sounds particularly interesting, but it’s not like I’m going to stop reading with only one volume left to go.

However, I do think that “Gantz” won’t be delivering a finish that will make up for its wildly uneven quality over the course of its run.  It’s had some really compelling parts, and a lot of sections that made you feel like Oku was simply just phoning it in.  I’ll be re-reading the whole series in advance of the final volume (as well as the inevitable podcast about it), so there’s a chance I could feel differently about it afterwards.  I wouldn’t bet on it, but it could happen!