Review by Frank Plowright

Former friends Kei and Kato have been reunited in desperate circumstances, co-opted into a strange filmed game with advanced technology, where they’re given guns and armour before being transported into Tokyo at night to kill aliens. In the current round they’re accompanied by several thugs, Kei doesn’t have his armour with him, and the one person with accumulated information has been killed. Gantz 4 ended with Kei surrounded, and in the presence of what appears to be an alien leader.

In one respect Gantz is extremely fast paced. There’s always something going on, and with ten people involved in each mission, switching from one scene to another is always a possibility. Yet for all that, there’s already a threat of repetition as the threats are escalated and prolonged meaning the sequence begun in Gantz 3 still occupies most of this volume.

Hiroya Oku’s art is detailed and precise, but as noted, his storytelling is extremely decompressed. A scene that might occupy a few pages in an equivalent American action comic is extended in Gantz over a couple of chapters, and so sixty pages, albeit with large panels. There’s no faulting the actual drawing, but when Oku’s obviously not short of ideas, why prolong the scenes?

As in the previous volumes, Oku begins every chapter with an exploitative pin-up of the only significant female cast member to date. She’s also derisively nicknamed Titz by the computer intelligence. It’s regressive, offensive and a poor use of the adult classification. There’s also offensive language about someone being revealed as gay, but that’s more understandable in terms of some characters being plain objectionable. In a neat piece of personality revelation there’s also a reminder that when we first met Kei he was hardly overflowing with the love of humanity.

The final three chapters do move matters forward, and at a fair clip, introducing new cast members and dispensing with some of the old in interesting ways. It leaves an almost new cast with very different personalities to move into Gantz 6.

Alternatively both are combined in the second pocket sized Gantz Omnibus.