Gantz: A Comment

(Being a sideways response to Noah’s review of Monster Volume 1)

Synopsis: Ordinary Japanese are being snatched from the jaws of death by an alien force (Gantz) which puts them to work hunting down extraterrestrials prowling the streets of Tokyo. Armed with cybernetic suits and devastating guns, their lives are constantly on the line in this video game made flesh. Limbs are sliced off, heads explode and aliens are blown away. Girls take off their clothes, smile and then lean forward. The reader ejaculates into his warm sweaty palm.

***

In his review of Monster, Noah advises us that he would “rather pursue the trashier Gantz, which manages to be a lot more thoughtful and truthful about morality by the simple expedient of not idolizing its central characters.” Having read a few more volumes of the series, I would suggest that Noah mistakes base instincts, unfiltered onanism and self-indulgent stupidity for those more virtuous attributes.

I first came across Gantz sometime in early 2000 (a few years before the Dark Horse editions came out) at my local manga shop where a member of the sales staff enjoined me to purchase the latest hot tittie from the shores of Japan – all prominently displayed and soaked up by an adoring male audience. The first volume left me rolling my eyes and the latest ones I’ve read (on Noah’s “exhortation”) have merely confirmed my suspicions.

Gantz is 4 parts action and 1 part titillation. The boring parts first. There is little which differentiates this title from your average shonen manga in terms of action (see Naruto and Bleach). Gantz being a seinen title, there are more decapitations and dismemberments on display but the routine is established and time honored: enemy of the day, technique of the day and boss fights. Deaths and mutilations are frequent and uninvolving. I suppose that some might call Gantz a brilliant evocation of the loneliness of the long distance video gamer but I’m not listening.

In the comments section of Noah’s review, “Subdee” suggests that the series is a “moral black hole” but my disappreciation of Gantz has nothing to do with morality. Unlike Noah, I’ve generally found morality to be troublesome (though not totally ineffectual) as an aesthetic yardstick. Rather the essential nature of Gantz can be addressed in much more organic terms – it is, quite simply, a cesspit of raging hormones.

It would be easy to imagine this manga being put together by a bunch of sexually deprived nerds huddled around a computer screen but, no, I’m going to be kind here and just call them a group of over-sexed wankers. Gantz is clearly aimed at young males with a history of gaming, buying gravure idol magazines and indulging in H games. Nothing particularly unusual or pathetic here. Everyone can do with a bit of interactive porn now and then, but let’s not mistake this for great entertainment much less great art. Artistic dedication in Gantz can be narrowed down to the use of CGI to churn out as much dreck as possible. The creator’s idea of high drama is the schoolyard bully as tooth collector, reimagining educational institutions as prison yards (people who can’t stand anal overtones please look away) and auditorily frying a grandmother and her grandchild’s innards. Can we really be surprised that Gantz reviewers are so often reduced to talking about bosoms, guns and bursting flesh?

Tucker Stone would have us believe that “Gantz is fucking mean, gnarly shit” and that “it’s yet to reach the point where the shocks don’t bring surprise” but he’s wimping out here. These guys probably wanted to do Guido Crepax’s version of The Story of O before deciding they preferred to make as much money as possible. Or maybe they just didn’t have the balls.

Instead we get a cute dog licking the heroine’s pussy (no medical terms required here since this is pornography) not a Doberman viciously penetrating a reluctant female. Gantz is a limp dick in the violence department, exactly the kind of thing you expect from gentlemen who prefer adorable mutts to large angry canines. It’s the popcorn of transgression, the missionary position of entertainment.

I don’t care to read any interviews by the team behind the manga but I imagine their idols must be Buronson, Koike and Ikegami. Those guys had more style when it came down to the blood, sex and misogyny. Gantz, on the other hand, is manga as masturbation and my only advice to those who can’t do without Gantz is to engage a high class call-girl or to go out and shoot some small animals for a change.

Don’t waste your time on this one, Noah.

11 thoughts on “Gantz: A Comment

  1. Well, I’ve already ordered volumes 2-4…so we’ll see how those go.

    There are definitely a number of moments in the first volume that I found interesting and effective — and, as I sort of indicated, trashy genre product doesn’t per se put me off. So far it looks a lot better than a number of similar titles I’ve looked at (Dorohedoro, for example). But I’ll give the next few chapters a shot and report back!

  2. I have to say, your claim that the bestiality isn’t shocking because the dog is cute seems misguided. Cute can often be more disturbing than fierce. The most disturbing movie I think I’ve ever seen was “Meet the Feebles” — cute muppets shooting each other and having sex is viscerally disturbing in a way that even an effective “standard” horror movie (like the Romero dead films) can’t really manage.

  3. Before it was licensed, I read a lot of Gantz– I think I was somewhere in the late 100’s, early 200’s. Which sounds like a lot, but chapters fly by with Gantz, given the pacing.

    I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think Gantz actually does become in its later volumes … becomes something; I’m not sure what. The bad guys all seem very explicitly stolen from big blockbuster movies– but the good & evil bits have been scrubbed out, any pretense about being about something, just leaving ridiculous violence and sex. In a way, the absence of meaning starts to feel like meaning.

    (The series does start to break from the monster-of-the-week format you identify in later arcs, incidentally).

    Gantz… Gantz is just all sensation. But I guess- it presents “entertainment” in such a clinical way that I know I did end up wondering why I’m so entertained by guns & tits more than I would reading a title that was less… explicit.

    I’m not saying it’s doing anything intentionally, or anything too interesting thematically, or that it’s some subversive story about how big blockbuster entertainment dehumanizes its audiences. Well, maybe it’s doing that last bit a LITTLE but only to better appeal to the adolescent self-loathing of its audience. There are always characters who take to the Gantz situation enthusiastically– and those are always the worst characters. But I don’t think that’s because Gantz is “mature” but because doing that makes it even more teenage…?

    I don’t think it’s thoughtful at all, or thoughtful about morality (and I think I personally prefer Monster overall). But … I like the unfiltered onanism of it, I guess– I enjoy guns & tits & titillation. I liked that– you know, you hear American comics referred to as “adolescent power fantasies” but they’re really not as honest as Gantz. As a story, I wouldn’t defend Gantz but as cartography of a teenage boy’s brain at age 13– maybe that makes me a horrible person but yeah… Gantz is just a purer, more concentrated dosage of mindless adolescent power fantasy, I guess is what I’m saying. But I mean that in a good way.

    Plus: I liked the high concept– I like normal guys vs. abnormal threats generally (the king of that genre probably being Ghostbusters). And I liked how they evolved the high concept over the life of it.

    “These guys probably wanted to do Guido Crepax’s version of The Story of O before deciding they preferred to make as much money as possible”

    I think that the Gantz creator’s prior series was an ecchi series called Hen about two Japanese schoolgirls, one of whom wants to seduce the other, etc.

  4. Hey, Noah, don’t say I didn’t warn you. You could have gone to a manga cafe to read the books – they’re very fast reads and clearly designed as such. The creator claims that one of his favorite movies of all time is Die Hard so you’re going to see lots of iterations of that movie plot (one against many in confined spaces etc.).

    It’s a fanboy wank journal (sort of “dojinshi”/fanfic gone pro) – naked girls falling into your lap and who don’t mind their tits being pinched for fun; sex with Lara Croft etc.

    That bestiality reference was quite comic-specific. I was thinking of putting up a scan of the Crepax page but seeing as HU is a family friendly site and all..I wouldn’t say it’s the height of perversity but it definitely has more bite in it than Gantz’s friendly Border Collie. Don’t know if the people at TCJ.com will be very happy with having a blow job on their front page though.

    Abhay: Thanks for the thoughtful response.

    I stopped reading around the early part of Volume 9 somewhere around the post high-school massacre which I thought was trying to develop some unearned feelings for the stock characters – didn’t work of course. From the volumes I’ve read, Gantz’s intentions are far more noble than what you suggest it does in small quantities: “that it’s some subversive story about how big blockbuster entertainment dehumanizes its audiences.” Not that adolescents don’t experience any self-loathing as you say. But in this case, I’m reasonably certain that the author feels that all the sex and violence is pretty cool – Gantz is about fun not guilt; its creation is undoubtedly an act of pleasure and self-pleasure. So, yes, you’re absolutely right when you say that, “Gantz is just a purer, more concentrated dosage of mindless adolescent power fantasy, I guess is what I’m saying.”

    If there is a reason why the characters who take to the Gantz situation “enthusiastically” also frequently turn out to be the “worst”, this would be due to the pretty simplistic moral code found in most action movies and anime. This says that doing intentional violence to others is wrong and that a real “hero” should shed tears over it. It’s also a vague stab at creating a sympathetic hero who finds release only in his video gaming skills. It’s very very Gundam – hero destroys worlds but gets to weep; it’s worked brilliantly for decades.

    So cartography of an onanist’s mind (to paraphrase) is correct but you’ve got the age group wrong (unless you’re talking about mental age). I have no proof but I think this appeals to an older age group as well (maybe someone belonging to a Japaneze Gantz fan club can tell us). I don’t mind some of the action bits but the creator’s sense of what constitutes great pornography is pretty puerile. Rarely have so many breasts been put in service to so little effect.

    Thanks for the HEN reference. Would appear to be a standard plotline for hentai. Strangest product I’ve seen from an H Game would be Kimi ga Nozomu Eien which managed to turn erotica into romance.

  5. The opening scene; the hero ends up standing next to an old school friend he hasn’t seen in a while, though they don’t acknowledge each other. Then a bum falls in front of the train; the school friend goes to rescue him, can’t do it alone, looks for help — and calls out to the hero, who doesn’t want to help at all. But somehow, because it’s his friend (who he doesn’t even like) and because he’s been singled out, he goes down to help — it’s presented as a social and psychological accident, believable in part because the hero is an adolescent and obviously has only a very passing acquaintance with his own motivations or inner life.

    It’s subtle and believable and weird, and even kind of poignant. I didn’t see anything nearly that deft in the volume of Monster I read. A scene or two like that per volume, and I’m hooked for the duration.

  6. I think you might get one or two more scenes like that (your mileage may vary) but some of those volumes you just bought are going to be cover to cover alien takedowns.It all gets a bit tiresome after a while since there’s no emotional payback try as Oku might.

    Hmm, don’t know about posting this particular instance of filth. I think slapping each other with dead fish is still a lot more acceptable than Doberman sex. You want to be sensitive that way…

  7. I should add there’s actually two HEN series… the earlier one was apparently a boobs ‘n panties-loaded guy-targeted sex comedy about a male student’s unshakable attraction to another boy, whom he’s convinced is a girl inside (I think in its earliest version it was an anime-type fantasy sex-change thing, but then became something else when it expanded to a series). This all somehow involves Oku’s presence as an in-story character… I’d like to see more of that, but for unfathomable reasons it looks like only the girl-girl story is very well known among English-language enthusiasts!

  8. Pingback: Moto Hagio heading to SDCC « MangaBlog

Comments are closed.