Gantz vol. 31

Okay.  I know that I’ve been fairly critical of this series in the past, but I’m starting to think that it has finally turned a corner here.  After the previous volume managed to present a series of events that didn’t annoy the hell out of me, this one continues the momentum on several fronts.  Things start out with Kei forcing an ordinary alien woman to help him and the humans he rescued get off the spaceship.  Not only are the tables turned in this encounter as the alien female has to suffer through the murder of several of her kind, but we also get some insight into how desirable a piece of real estate Earth is in the galactic scheme of things.  Meanwhile, Kato, Reika and Kei’s clone put out the call to the other Gantz teams in Japan — and even further than that — to fight the aliens.  There’s even more going on than this:  Tae deals with the terrors of captivity and a horny male companion, aliens get ripped apart in telekinetic vengeance, and we even find out what the deal is with the Douchebags.  Credit where credit is due, mangaka Hiroya Oku’s explanation for them has their doucebagginess making perfect sense.

That’s not to say that this volume is issue-free, though.  Nishi is still a dick.  The naked-guy-inside-Gantz also feels like a deus-ex-machina device for plot exposition than an actual character.  Yet it feels like the narrative has actual depth to it for the first time in a while after volumes of wanton violence and senseless human deaths.  You get a real feeling that the human resistance actually means something here along with their perceived insignificance in galactic affairs.  That may seem paradoxical, but it adds to the tension as we see the Gantz coalition save some humans from certain death and bear witness to Tae’s status as an inhabitant of the alien equivalent of a bug farm.  The volume ends on an effective cliffhanger as the mother of the alien who has taken Tae in wonders just what’s so special about these creatures as she dangles the girl off of a balcony.  “Gantz” still has a ways to go before it recaptures the near-glory days it had before vol. 21, and now I actually think it has a shot at doing just that.