A mix of crazy awesome and slightly bland
Creative Staff
Story: ONE
Art: Yusuke Murata
Translation: John Werry
What They Say
While Saitama’s distracted at a martial arts tournament, Centichoro, a threat-level Dragon monster, attacks! Metal Bat engages it in battle but struggles against its gargantuan size. The monster knocks him into the distance and right into the path of hero-hunter Garo!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening act this time around is the fight between Metal Bat and the massive monster Centichoro. Unsurprisingly, this turns into a chance for Murata to show off his art skills again, and he does indeed do so quite wonderfully. The sense of scale is just plain crazy here, and though it’s no surprise, the amount of talent on display just absolutely drips off the page in a crazy rollercoaster of action. This then continues into a fight with Garo, which is certainly no slouch either. Honestly, this sequence alone (combined with his awesome punk styling and combat style of just plain whacking things with a bat) has definitely elevated Metal Bat to one of my favorites in the series, as it’s just plain awesome from start to finish. Speaking of which, we get a rather amusing gag ending to the fight, and it’s played pretty damn perfectly too.
The rest of the volume, sadly, doesn’t fair quite as well. On Saitama’s end, we’re still wrapped up in the martial arts tournament, which is just kind of eh. Like, we get a whole lot of setup, one big blowout of character introductions which are largely just gags taking up more page space than they probably should, and one brief joke fight. So yeah, that’s definitely a bit of a drag. The other big part of the volume is showing off the various monsters on a rampage, which is decent, but not terribly exceptional. Essentially it’s still just more setup for what’s to come, alongside showing off some gag designs of varying quality. If nothing else, though, the one involving a certain monster holding a sign is a pretty perfectly played little sight gag, and it definitely got a hearty chuckle out of me.
The main bonus chapter is focused on Saitama ending up on a team, and it’s honestly just kind of so-so. The gags feel sort of been-there-done-that, and there’s not really much of note to it, but it’s not especially bad either. The super brief Metal Bat one is definitely worth a laugh or two, though.
In Summary
With this volume, we get a bit of a mix of good and bad, as the monster association stuff continues to heat up alongside the tournament arc. The former part largely takes place as one giant bit of artistic flash for the first half of the volume, and that’s every bit as glorious as you’d hope. Once that passes, though, the volume slows down a LOT. The monster association stuff still manages to jam in a few visual gags of note, but the tournament arc then drags things down massively. It’s not that it’s entirely bland, but it’s just not all that exciting, and is easily the weakest part of the series thus far. But even so, it’s not enough to ruin the volume, which is more than worth it for the action-packed excitement of the first half alone.
Content Grade: A-
Art Grade: A+
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: March 7th, 2017
MSRP: $9.99
