It’s got blood and guts, guns and ammo and a naked girl and a bike. It’s taken two years of negotiations with the Japanese manga publisher Shueisha, but this month, Dark Horse will publish Gantz, the manga series that American fans thought would never be licensed for the U.S. Hiroya Oku’s Gantz, a hyperviolent, sexually explicit, surreal manga series about a very different kind of afterlife, will be published quarterly until volume 4 after which it will publish on a bimonthly schedule.
"Gantz is one of the biggest seinen [manga for young men] properties out now,” said Michael Gombos, Dark Horse director of Asian licensing, who actively pursued Japanese publisher Shueisha for the license. "American fans have been asking for this for a long time, and the licensing culture in manga wasn't going to get in the way."
Gantz has also been developed into an anime series and is distributed in the U.S. by ADV, for whom it was a bestseller in 2006. A Playstation II videogame was also developed as part of the franchise in Japan. For its American publication, Dark Horse will release a first printing of more than 20,000 copies of volume 1. Currently under review by the manga buyer of Barnes & Noble, Gantz is already being carried by comic shops like Forbidden Planet in New York and in all seven stores of Lone Star Comics in Texas. The series will be shrink-wrapped and labeled for mature readers.
Spending two years to acquire a license isn't unusual in the manga licensing business (another Dark Horse property, Blood+, also took two years). But Gantz is owned by Shueisha, one of the parent companies of Viz Media, which releases titles by Shueisha and Shogakukan in the U.S.
"Given Shueisha's relationship with Viz, it was [thought to be] unlikely [that we'd get it]," Gombos said. "But Viz is a family entertainment company. And Gantz is not something you sit down and read with your son."
ADV sales and marketing manager Chris Oarr described the anime as "the most nihilistic and bloody of its time." And, he added, "the source material reflects that." In Gantz, a group of strangers who have apparently recently died are gathered together in an apartment that is also occupied by a large black orb and given a second chance at life—as long as they take part in a live-action game of "shoot-the-alien." The protagonist of Gantz is a high school student, but the cast of characters includes a salaryman, yakuza thugs and a couple of beautiful girls, and will eventually include a grandmother and small children. There is a distinct feeling of vulnerability throughout the series as the players slowly figure out the rules of the violent game and how to survive.
What sets Gantz apart from other manga in the same genre is its sharp detail—courtesy of Oku's use of computer graphics—and his manipulation of individual perspective to create a series that is visceral and unpredictable. In the series, Oku visualizes the story in a manner that places the reader in the action. Using specific "camera" angles and playing on various characters’ points of view, Oku emulates the feel of a first-person videogame.
Gombos is enthusiastic about the release of the controversial manga. "Whatever it is that you like in seinen [manga], Gantz has it,” Gombos said.
ADV’s Chris Oarr said he believes that Oku's accessible character designs will help the series sell. "The realistic portrayals—[as in] such series as Sanctuary and Crying Freeman—harkens back to a [more] western comics style."
Gantz has already built a fan base in the U.S. through the anime and through the online scanlation [English language translations by fans posted on the Internet] of the manga. Omanga, a scanlation group, first began scanning, translating and uploading the manga for English readers in March 2003. From there, fans sprouted and demanded more. According to the single-named Zyph of the Omanga scanlation site, his group dropped Gantz about a year later after other fan translators began scanlating it much more quickly to feed the fan hunger. "Six or seven volumes into it, we had a bunch of competitors. It took on a life of its own,” Zyph said.
Around that time, the Gantz anime also premiered in Japan and fansubs [unofficial subtitled versions of the film, which are a violation of copyright] of the series were spreading via BitTorrent sites. Online forums also flowered, with dedicated readers following both anime and manga chapters closely and commenting on the series as a whole. "Probably the best-drawn manga I've ever read," one commenter posted in the Gantz forum on the Naruto Forums Web site. Another fan said that Gantz is "probably also the saddest and most disgusting manga I've ever read. I'm kind of afraid of the Gantz manga."
“There is a lot of explicit violence and risque graphics that aren't necessary for the story,” Zyph said. But Gombos believes otherwise. "It appeals on different levels. Fans of [Masamune] Shirow [creator of the acclaimed sci-fi manga series Ghost in the Shell] or weaponry, the level of technology, the suits, the bike, or the fan service, are going to be into it."
Fan service [the practice of adding gratuitous sexual content to a series] never hurts. But Oarr thinks that the property distinguishes itself as a whole. "This is a franchise with an idea behind it. It’s ultra-violent, but deals with themes of alienation in a really creative, bizarre way. The premise of the story deals with people who are already dead, who're bad people, who're in society but they're not. It covers some new ground.
"There are few manga for older readers that have genuine commercial success,” Oarr continued. "I'm hopeful that Gantz will [be one of them]."
