Gantz, I Am a Hero Recommendations
Both Mangas are very dark, mature, bloody, violent, horrific, and all things that make a good seinen. They both have the premise of fighting to survive, aliens and Zombies with the latter. They also are similar in that later in their stories they things become extremely grandiose in scale and that affects humanity on an existential level. Though they both possess a similar tone, they differ greatly in approach with characterization . As Gantz is more of the cliche cool/bad ass guy that kills everything with his friends, while I am a Hero follows a guy the opposite, being delusional, socially awkward and a bit
of a pacifist in a world outbroken by zombies.
read more
- Art style
- Easy to read
- Good history, bad end
I feel these manga are quite similar due to their otaku main characters and very basic initial premises both gradually becoming larger in nature, incorporating foreign (to japan) story lines and characters. In addition to that, both manga are also heavily traced and have subplots that go nowhere.
Gantz and I Am a Hero both have a very similar ending utilizing a bastardized part of Buddhist philosophy called saṃsāra as a part of their narratives.
The use of saṃsāra has been criticized and praised by fans of both series.
Criticized because it undermines the sacrifice of all the dead characters that can now be revived/ are revived and praised for bringing back fan favourite characters.
Depending on whether you liked that aspect of the story or not you should consider reading or not reading the other story.
Update It’s been a month since I posted this and in that time I got a couple of people asking
how saṃsāra fits into the narrative of both stories and where you can see it occur. This was included in my original version of this recommendation but MAL accidentally deleted it, as a result, I'll have to try to summarize it again and not spoil anything.
To start off with I'll have to explain what Saṃsāra is as a lot of people are confused about it.
Firstly saṃsāra in any religion doesn't specify that reincarnation/rebirth needs to be in the form of a human and does not specify the individual has to be aware of their prior self. Secondly, when you go through saṃsāra you're not supposed to remember your past. (samsara is also observed in other religions but because of the form it takes in both series it is evident it's based on Buddhist saṃsāra and considering that Buddhism is the only religion in japan that practice samara it makes sense the authors base their bastardized version off of it)
In the case of the ZQN in I Am a Hero they are still physically Zombies but they regain a part of if not all their consciousness/memories depending on the individual and point in the story. The most apparent time in the series this is shown is when the Nameless Mass of Brains (NMB) is shown communicating with the people inside itself. The zombies/people integrated into the NMB hive mind, have regained their sanity, intelligence, emotions, memories and personalities from when they were human (source chapter 231). Fully conscious ZQN also appears in chapters 188-190 and 217.
There was never a definitive answer to what the ultimate fate of humans will be but you can infer from the aforementioned chapters that the *Spoilers* aliens intend to keep the consciences of humans and turn them into tools in potential some kind of hive mind. This lessens the impact of the destruction of humanity as instead of being wiped out they have been enslaved. *Spoilers*
Moving on to Gantz, it talks about how the concept of saṃsāra works in their world in the Room of Truth or Alien God chapters 369-372.
In chapter 372 someone inquired if flesh and blood were really all there were to humans' existence, questioning the existence of the human soul. The God Aliens then clarified if the "soul" he was referring to is the 21 grams of data released the moment a human died. It then started to explain that such a thing indeed exists. It then explained that when a human dies, this 21 grams of data migrates to a separate dimension. It is then extracted from the separate dimension and then imported into a new body when a new human baby is born.
I can't get into how this fits into the overall story without spoilers but I can say that this encounter leads to the undermining of all the sacrifices in the story.
read more
-both are very mature
-both are at its core manga about people trying to survive
-both feature a protagonist who trough bad things happening around him finds a purpose in life
