7 Reasons We Love One-Punch Man

Usually when I list the reasons I love a manga series, the main character is pretty close to the top. That’s not the case with One-Punch Man. Saitama, the title character, is laconic to a fault. He became a superhero because he was bored, but he finds being a superhero pretty boring too. He’s the least excited (or exciting) character in almost every panel. Call him No-Drama Saitama.
That doesn’t mean the manga is dull. On the contrary, writer ONE and artist Yusuke Murata crank up the tropes of superhero comics and kaiju movies to their extremes, creating a huge cast of bizarre villains and superheroes who battle through huge cities that shatter like cheap plastic models. Saitama glides calmly through the chaos, seldom batting an eye, until he gets bored and ends it all with a single punch. Because he is, after all, One-Punch Man.
The tension, then, comes not from wondering whether the good guys will win—that is foreordained—but from the infighting among the huge cast of superheroes. The humor is a humor of contrasts: Beefy he-men argue over petty matters, while Saitama dispatches meteors, monsters, and alien invaders with a flick of the fist.

The Bad Guys
The best satire walks a fine line between the plausible and the absurd. The villains of One-Punch Man are far from plausible, but they do have a familiar look, and Murata endows each with convincing details—teeth, claws, eyes, skin. They are rooted in reality: their bodies feel solid, their proportions make sense, their veins and muscles bulge. This can’t be discounted—a lot of manga monsters are actually kind of hard to see, disappearing in a cloud of body parts and speedlines. The monsters in One-Punch Man look like they just stepped out of an audition for a kaiju movie—and they won’t be called back, because they are too weird: Piggie Bank, who demands “Coins! Put in coins!”; Incarnation of Electric Light String, who developed superpowers by shadow-boxing the string dangling from an electric light; Demon Fan, who literally blows away the opposition; Crablante, who became a crab-clawed monster by eating too much crab; a sexy mosquito girl who unleashes swarms of mosquito minions to suck humans dry. Even the lesser creatures are well articulated, and every one is different. The only thing they are not endowed with is great intelligence.

The Sidekick
Fairly early on, Saitama acquires a half-human, half-cyborg disciple, Genos. Genos has all the sidekick qualities—he’s earnest, loyal, and a bit naive. However, his enthusiasm for the job far surpasses Saitama’s, which is a good thing: left to his own devices, Saitama would just read manga, sleep, and throw the occasional punch. Genos keeps dragging him into the action.

The Good Guys
Japanese superheroes are pretty regimented. They often belong to associations or even for-profit corporations (as in Tiger and Bunny) that have different levels and classes. When he realizes that no one knows who he is, Saitama signs on with the Hero Association—but he ends up in the lowest rank. Genos, on the other hand, gets a perfect score and is placed in the highest rank.
Just as ONE and Murata come up with a colorful array of villains and monsters, they have also assembled the motliest crew of superheroes this side of the Pacific. Tank-Top Tiger, Atomic Samurai, Metal Bat, The Red Muffler, The Grad-School Grad. Most just make cameo appearances, but there’s one badass old martial-arts type, Bang, who is a steady presence, while Terrible Tornado, a girl with psychic abilities, is something of a closer. Like the monsters, the heroes are meticulously designed extremes, some big and beefy, some slim and quick. Also like the monsters, most are not too bright, and they are constantly squabbling over who has to smash the meteor or who gets to clobber the giant octopus.
The lowest-ranked superheroes, Class C, have to find a steady stream of minor menaces to fight in order to keep their standing and advance through the ranks. This means there is a lot of jockeying and bickering, and at one point, a group of superheroes that look like they just ran out of the Star Wars cantina hitches a ride on a van to get to a fight, spilling out the windows and riding on the roof.

Short Attention Span Theater
One-Punch Man doesn’t bog you down in a long story that goes on and on. It started out as a webcomic, and the first few volumes in particular reflect that, with short episodes that are just one or two chapters long. After that, things do stretch a bit, and there’s a story arc about an epic fight with a spaceship that runs two volumes, but then it’s back to more compact storytelling.
The Sound Effects
The sound effects are truly dynamic, matching and often amplifying whatever is going on in the art. Since they are translated into English, credit for this must go to touch-up artist and letterer James Gaubatz.

One-Punch Man
OK, OK, Saitama is a pretty cool character. He’s so checked out that no matter how extreme the situation is, it doesn’t ruffle him. He’s more interested in the little things, like getting to the supermarket on bargain day. Usually a lead character has a strong drive, and Saitama is no exception—after all, he trained so hard that his hair fell out—but he refuses to be sucked into anyone else’s drama. He’s his own man. But if he does have to acknowledge other people’s priorities, he can usually take care of the situation with a single punch. And really, wouldn’t we all like to be like that?

The Uncanny Valley of the Superheroes
In the end, One-Punch Man works because it is both a great superhero comic and a great superhero comic satire. Most of the tropes are in there—origin stories, very specific powers, costumes and capes, outlandish names, endangered children, massive adversaries, shadowy organizations. They are well done, too—Murata is a superb artist and the characters and action scenes hang together really well. But it’s all absurd. In the very first sequence, a monster is threatening a crying, ponytailed girl. Her T-shirt reads “School Girl,” a giant nudge in the ribs to the reader not to take this seriously. The next kid to be rescued (he drew nipples on Crablante) has a scrotum-like chin and no clue that drawing nipples on a giant crab would be a bad idea. The heroes are serious about their costumes, their names, and their rankings. And One-Punch Man?
The only thing he’s serious about is getting to the store when ramen is on sale.
Volumes one through eight of One-Punch Man are available now. Vol. 9 arrives November 1.