The Gantz manga is a story of two high school students named Kei Kurono and Masaru Kato, who are run over by a subway train when trying to save the life a homeless man who fell into the tracks.  After their deaths, Kei and Masaru find that they are in an apartment in Tokyo with several other people and an black sphere called Gantz (ガンツ in Japanese katakana).

The black sphere eventually opens up revealing a man and different racks that contain items and equipment for them to use.  After the Gantz sphere instructs everyone in the apartment that their lives now belong to him, he shows them different targets that they must go kill.  Armed with their special black suits that give them special powers, the people in this room are then transported to Earth, where they must fulfill their mission of killing the targets the Gantz sphere gave them.  These targets are aliens living on Earth.

After being transported to Earth, nobody can leave until all of the alien targets have been destroyed, or time has run out.  Upon being transported back to the apartment with the Gantz sphere, they are awarded points based on the number of aliens that they have killed.  As long as they survived the mission and made it back to this apartment, they are then allowed to return to their lives and continue living until they are summoned once again.  The only way to leave this cycle is by earning one hundred points, which they can then use to buy their freedom.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pittaya/ / CC BY 2.0

The story for the manga series, written by Hiroya Oku, was first dreamt up when he was in High School.  However, he did not decide to start writing Gantz until after he published a different manga with a similar theme.  It’s a good thing he did because there are thousands of people who read Gantz manga in Weekly Young Jump and in tankobon format.  This term is used to describe a separate Gantz manga volume, that has been published separate from an anthology.

Gantz is also a popular anime consisting of two series with a total of 26 episodes, a video game for the Playstation 2, and a set of novels.  In addition, it was announced in October 2009 that two live action Gantz films are in production, set to be released in the spring and winter of 2011.  Clearly the story has remained intriguing enough to maintain its large following and spark some exciting new things related to the manga.

Last Modified : February 7th, 2010 Filed under : Manga Navigate : Previous post / Next post