Like most kids who were born in the 1990s, I grew up on the Toonami block of Cartoon Network. One of the things that Toonami heavily featured was an anime called “Dragon Ball” and its later sequel, “Dragon Ball Z”. What both of those anime had in common was a theme of power creep: each enemy introduced was stronger than the last, with the main heroes given new powers to compensate in order to win.
So, an anime that starts with slightly-better-than-average humans duking it out and ends with super-beings that can blow holes in planets. Eventually, it makes one wonder where it ends. Are we going to have characters that can blow away universes or something? How strong is too strong?
“One Punch Man,” published in America by Viz Media, takes that question and runs with it, straight to the logical conclusion. It presents us with Saitama, a man who part-times as a hero. But there’s a catch – Saitama can beat anyone with just one punch. As is to be expected, doing hero work bores the hell out of him. Which brings us to one of the things I like the most about what I’ve seen in “One Punch Man” so far: it shows that it is entirely possible for someone to be too powerful and that being so just makes life incredibly boring. There’s actually a section of the first episode where Saitama has a dream about a race of underground creatures called Subterranean People that actually end up posing a challenge to him. Just as Saitama is about to fight the Subterranean People’s king, the dream ends.
When the Subterranean King actually arrives seconds later, Saitama defeats him with a single punch, causing the Subterranean People to surrender immediately. Even when Saitama’s dreams come true he can’t catch a break. The above situation just shows some of the ways the show pokes fun at itself. It’s refreshing to see in series, especially one as new as “One-Punch Man” (which only has 9 episodes out thus far). All told, I really enjoyed what I’ve seen of “One-Punch Man” so far. The animation is crisp and clean, reminding me of later episodes of another Toonami anime I used to watch, “Yu Yu Hakusho”. On the other hand, the plot seems a little more slapstick and a little less serious, which makes sense since it’s mostly a parody anime, but it would still be nice to see a parody anime with a more serious plotline. I will grant, though, that I’ve only seen maybe four of the nine episodes put out so far, so maybe the series gets a little more serious as time goes on. Even with that caveat, I rate “One-Punch Man” very highly and recommend it to anyone who enjoys anime such as “Dragon Ball Z”, “Yu Yu Hakusho,” or even more mundane anime such as “Hajime no Ippo.”
The Review Shack 