Gantz vol. 27

When we last left our protagonists, THEY WERE PRETTY MUCH FUCKED!  Thrust into Italy along with several other Gantz teams right into a mission gone horribly, horribly wrong with the aliens in question slaughtering everyone.  That continues straight into this volume as Kei, Kato, and the rest of the crew try to handle the chaos as best they can.  It’s an astonishing sequence that shows the title’s action storytelling at its best.  The danger, the drama, the utter randomness with which some characters are brutally picked off is communicated incredibly well in the art.  Then, without warning, everyone is transported back to the room and the problems start piling up.

It has become increasingly clear that while mangaka Hiroya Oku can craft some impressive action sequences his actual storytelling abilities leave something to be desired.  “Gantz” has become increasingly littered with ideas that seem promising, then are botched in the execution and subsequently reversed.  The death of Kei’s girlfriend Tae and her subsequent return, Kei’s own death and resurrection, the introduction and subsequent slaughter of the Osaka team.  Then you’ve got moments like Nishi’s slaughter of his classmates in the last volume which seems like it was meant to play out as some kind of bullying revenge fantasy, but only served to make an already unsympathetic character even more so.

Still, Oku does have some good ideas that emerge from time-to-time.  Somewhat interestingly, they tend to emerge when exploring the various romantic relationships of the cast.  That’s the case again here when Reika makes a surprising choice about who to resurrect from Gantz’s memory when she gets the chance.  It’s a choice that creates more problems than it actually solves and leads to some interesting drama about what this character has to deal with now.  The best example of this involves a debate between this person and his counterpart over their respective romantic entanglements.  It was utterly believable, and funny, to see him be a dick to himself about this particular issue.

If only this volume had continued to explore that issue and the lives of its surviving cast members.  But no, Oku decides to press on with Kikuchi the journalist’s investigation into the origin of the Gantz spheres.  To say that this subplot was ill-advised is something of an understatement.  Yes, the origin of the spheres is a mystery but it’s not one that’s central to the appeal of the manga.  Its main duty is in setting up ordinary people to experience unreal encounters as they fight aliens with sci-fi weaponry.  While its existence may be fantastic, the manga’s story has never hinged on explaining its mystery.

Now that Oku is actually digging into it, you’d think that he has a good reason to.  You’d be wrong as Kikuchi’s journey in Germany feels random and pointless with the answers we’re given coming off as arbitrary at best.  A German buisnessman’s gigantic autistic daughter spouting off random numbers that, when decoded, allowed his company to expand tenfold and build the Gantz spheres?  What the hell?  We’re told that CNN and the BBC also came across the same story Kikuchi did, but didn’t report it because they didn’t know what to make of it.  Then you’ve got Kikuchi’s subsequent encounter with his translator who reveals that he is not who he seems to be and insinuates that he’s some god-like entity or a front for such a thing.  Rather than ominous or threatening, this encounter comes of as completely ridiculous with the most notable part of the whole sequence being the translator’s resemblance to a certain editor/English localizer at Dark Horse.

Then the world starts ending.

Taking a page right out of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” with the sky turning red, we’re told that the catastrophe indicated by Gantz’s countdown clock is at hand.  We get some very confusing sequences with some fighter jets attacking an unseen enemy while the characters suddenly find out that America is “gone.”  That’s right, “gone.”  It’s a very abrupt shift (which is heralded by some nice color pages which start off the last chapter) and as a result it’s hard to really get involved in these events since they’re not actually being communicated well in the story.  That’s particularly disappointing since Oku did a great job selling the stakes of the team’s “final” battle at the beginning of the volume.

By the time you get to the end of this one those events will feel like a distant memory.  As a buildup to what the mangaka has termed his series’ “final phase” it’s pretty disappointing.  My main hope now is that we’ll get back to the humans vs. aliens action that has defined the title and at least wrap things up with some impressive action sequences.  Maybe Oku will even find ways to give his cast some personal closure as well because his attempt to raise the story’s stakes and turn it into a fate-of-the-world epic has misfired badly.  I’ll continue to read this to the end because I’ve followed it long enough to want to see things through to the end, but I can’t say that anyone else should feel the need to do the same.