Tank Tankuro is historically important as a 1930s pre-war "manga", an early pioneer of story-driven manga, and an inspiration for Astro Boy and Doraemon, but the medium has come a long, long way since then. Pick this up for historical interest and the insightful essays bundled with the English print version, because the comic itself has little entertainment value.
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Tank Tankuro is a "superhero" of sorts, but is basically just a weird guy in a ball who fights weird enemies... like a sumo wrestler in a tree and a big monk with a bell. Tankuro initially goes around fighting a bunch of different characters, but eventually the stories coalesce into one long, war-themed imperialist plot with a talking monkey.
Tank Tankuro feels a lot like its inspiration, older Sunday comics from the West. Each story is squished and condensed into very few panels/pages, with little room to tell a complete story. At the same time, it tries to pull off more action-y scenes typical to manga, with much less dialogue than Western Sunday comics. But combining these two makes a total disaster: there aren't enough panels to fully describe a manga-like action sequence, and there's not enough dialogue to make it interesting. Ultimately it comes off as... boring.
This series was directed specifically at children in 1930s Japan, so it's a bit unfair for a Western adult in 2019 to be dumping all over it. But from the choppy story to the un-endearing main character, Tank Tankuro is a series that doesn't even hold up to its Western counterparts at the time (Popeye and Little Nemo, for example), much less modern-day manga. Pass on this one.
