Feb 27, 2024
This story reads like a smutty fever dream overlaying an over-the-top 70s/80s action movie. It is important going into it that the reader understands this is intended to be a work of comedic absurdity making fun of the macho-genre. This sometimes is not clear with how it is written though. I would take it as a form of "dry Japanese humour" akin to how British humour can be. With that in mind, it still has some flaws that keep it from being a great absurdist work.
SPOILERS BELOW
The Good:
The story will always be intentionally crazy. Like him fighting a native Brazilian tribe with a tree trunk
...
or flexing so powerfully knives which he was stabbed with remove themselves from his body. That absurdity tends to make me laugh more.
By book 5/6 they have introduced a bit of an entourage which really helps the story. Some of those characters are actually a bit interesting.
The humor can be very entertaining and well done at times. Though the story is crazier than any horrible B-tier action movie I did legitimately want to know what happens next. Many more respectable manga don't make that happen for me - so something underlying the weird story is a bit grasping.
The art is legitimately great. Everyone looks different which is a real accomplishment given the amount of people (both men and women) you see in the story. Often manga have all the women or men look the same or "too similar". Ikegami's art and ability to draw a variety of faces and people is superb. It's amazing how good the art is compared to the quality of the story. Fights and paneling are easy to follow and genuinely enjoyable to analyze and stop to admire at times. If you are into it, the nudity is accurate and "well done" I suppose.
The Bad:
The main character is an ex-football star who will always take the football stance in fights. It is absurd and equal parts groan inducing and comical. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I sighed in dismay.
There is a fair bit of racism.
The ending is not satisfying at all. It feels quite a bit like the manga was cancelled so they just simply wrapped it up. It is a "the journey is the destination" manga though the story was never clearly written that way. The end made me go "really, that is all?"
The Ugly:
As with many older manga stories, it suffers with a bit too much rape and that rape turning into adoration. This is far more prevalent in the first two books of the series, but it does come back up towards the end. This is not necessarily absent in other works by Kazuo Koike, but when viewed through the context of feudal Japan it ends up hitting differently than a story in 1980s Brazil & USA.
With the rape aside, it is still far too smutty. Similarly, that abates largely (but not totally) by the end of book 2. Women urinating comes up frequently, far too frequently. He also ends up with a 16-year-old girl which has some concerning elements for sure. Of course, she is shown nude often which continues the smutty off-putting trend.
The Conclusion:
I do not know if I would recommend reading it. It highly depends on the person, how seriously you take reading manga, and how much you can withstand dated tropes and difficult sexual situations. If a soft-core somewhat-rapey mega-macho man story with quite a bit of female nudity/explosions/action drawn extremely well is appealing - sure read it. If any of that is a red flag, I would avoid it. I guess I am happy I read it more out of morbid curiosity than anything. The stronger second half and fantastic art save it from being more like a 4/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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