By Hiroya Oku
Dark Horse, 224 pp.
Rating: Mature Readers (18 +)

The much hyped, long awaited, highly requested series Gantz finally makes its way to the US shelves thanks to fine folks at Dark Horse. A tale in which death is just the beginning, Gantz follows the exploits of a teen after his apparent death from being run over by a train. Only, it’s not the end. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a room full of other recently deceased folks, a dog, and mysterious black orb. What does it all mean? What’s going on? And what’s with the dog?

Unfortunately for the group, answers aren’t really forthcoming. Things take a decidedly odd twist when the orb begins relaying messages to them, ordering them to hunt and kill aliens while providing them with the necessary weapons and equipment for the task at hand. Some take the task at hand with an unsettling amount of gusto, while others are less than thrilled about being ordered to kill someone for no apparent reason.

If the first volume is any indication, Gantz has considerable potential. It touches on the unsettling level of apathy present in many modern cultures, (In the opening sequence, for example, the main characters die while trying to help a drunken man off the train tracks while dozens of other people watch on and do nothing.) Throughout the volume, Hiroya Oku demonstrates the ease with which people will sit back and watch horrible things happen to each other, or even get caught up in a mob mentality and participate in these horrible things, making Gantz both highly interesting and deeply unsettling. On the other hand, there’s just an over-the-topness to some of the events that made me roll my eyes and think, “You can’t be serious.” It’s certainly not going to be the most female-friendly book on the shelves, that’s for sure. The one female character first appears totally naked, and is immediately sexually assaulted by a yakuza member. She is saved from that situation, only to be sexually accosted by the dog moments later. Thankfully that don’t really show what the dog was licking buuuut… you can figure it out I’m sure.

Which is why Gantz so hard to really pin down. It jumps from interesting social commentary and critiquing, to a women being molested by a dog for laughs.

Art-wise, Gantz is OK. There’s actually bit in the back about the art process; apparently, Oku used a combination of pencils and 3D computer modeling. It’s an interesting experiment, but I think drawing over the models has resulted oddly stiff artwork. There’s no great sense of motion or movement in any of the action scenes, despite the nicely depicted gore and exploding body parts. The backgrounds are there, but despite the amount of detail in some of them, there’s a feeling of sparseness and starkness that they can’t quite shake. Normally this would be a bad thing, but here it actually works to story’s benefit. I found the starkness enhances the feeling of isolation between the characters, and that it lended itself to the surreal, video game vibe of the story. When the characters begin musing at the possibility of the entire situation being some sort of reality TV show, or hidden camera program, you look at the backgrounds and can really see why. The blandness and flatness of them gives the setting the feel of an old studio back lot full of building facades.

In the end it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me. There’s some very interesting stuff going on, some nice themes to be explored and examined, but the artwork and the weird pointless bits of bestiality were a bit off putting. At this point I think it was an interesting little read, but I can’t imagine sticking with it for the long run. Still, there’s definitely potential and I’ll probably worth giving the second volume a try to see if it improves.

Volume one of Gantz is available now.