The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Gigant

What's It About? 

Rei wants to be a film director like his father, but for now he's in high school trying to find someone willing to be the lead in his amateur project while he watches porn at night. One day on his way home from school he notices a series of posters proclaiming that the porn actress PaPiCo lives in the neighborhood, and between the harsh wording on the signs and the nasty comments on line, he determines to go out and take all of the posters down to help keep her safe. While he's doing that, however, he bumps into the woman herself, and they become friends. Chiho (her real name) turns to Rei for help when a strange old man sticks a device on her arm that allows her to change her size at will. Rei starts to wonder if it's somehow tied in with a popular apocalypse website, because all too many strange things are beginning to happen in their vicinity…

GIGANT is written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku. Seven Seas released it in March both in print ($13.99) and digitally ($9.99).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

GIGANT has a kitchen sink kind of first volume, as in “everything and the kitchen sink.” It's as if Hiroya Oku (creator of Gantz and Inuyashiki, both of which get a plug in this volume) was playing Mad Libs and decided to write a manga based on the random collection of verbs and nouns he ended up with. So if you're in the mood for a book about a high school boy who wants to be a director and collects porn DVDs of a pink-haired half-Swedish porn actress who lives in his neighborhood with her Corgi puppy and her abusive boyfriend who plays pachinko and gains the ability to grow and shrink after an old man in a bike helmet and underwear gets hit by a car implants it in her arm before he turns into a doll while middle school kids use an apocalypse polling website to cause human excrement to rain from the sky and also cause magnitude five earthquakes, then you're in luck!

If it were strictly trying to be a comedy, GIGANT would likely go down a bit easier, but there's absolutely no indication that it is – the characters all take what's happening very seriously and the violence in the story (primarily of the domestic variety) makes it highly unlikely that any of this is being played for laughs. On that note, there's a definite undercurrent of misogyny to the volume alongside all of the other elements. People continually put down Chise based on her work and her figure, making assumptions about what they can do to her because of it, and her family denigrates her constantly, going so far as to suggest that she instead work at a soapland – meaning prostitution – despite the fact that her career pays for their lifestyle. Her boyfriend hits her, and even Rei, who perhaps treats her the best of all of the characters thus far, can barely see past her body. In fact, she may as well not be anything more than a body to most people, and sometimes that feels like it goes for the artist himself as well.

This is only the first volume, however, and that means that her newfound powers might be a way for her to reclaim ownership of herself. But that's only if the storyline can decide what it wants to actually do instead of cramming in every single element that crosses the creator's mind. GIGANT is simply too busy to make a whole lot of sense, and when you pair that with the way its female protagonist is treated, that makes for a book that isn't going to work for everyone.

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Faye Hopper

Rating:

I was dreading having to read GIGANT. I don't like Hiroya Oku. I hate the way he draws women. I hate his shallow, nihilistic worldview. I hate how his stories start out as harsh slice-of-life (with even the occasional insight or emotionally resonant moment) and spiral off into incomprehensible, thematically tangential sci-fi nonsense. And it seems my reservations were well-founded. All this and more is in GIGANT. And yet, I did not hate the act of reading it quite in the way I hated Gantz.

The reasons for this are in how the story emphasizes acts of kindness and connection. The male protagonist of the story (a young aspiring filmmaker named Rei) is not Kei Kurono (I.E., an unrelenting misanthrope who hates, especially, the fact that he cannot get laid). He is at least somewhat capable of empathy and respecting women. The inciting incident for the manga is him tearing down signs that shame a pornstar, Papico, for her profession and reveal her as living in the area. When he finds out she has a boyfriend, too, he is at least happy they can still be friends. And then there's Papico (or her real name, Chiho) herself. Chiho's treatment is surprising in how it both respects her sex work as a valid means of making a living (she is supporting her entire family and her boyfriend) and, on occasion, even emphasizes her humanity and internality. There is still plenty that feels like edgy cruelty for its own sake (like an awful subplot involving Chiho's abusive boyfriend), but they make what I thought might be a relentless slog of misery somewhat bearable.

The issues arise in what these sparse moments of decency mask. There is a major age gap between Rei and Chihio (Rei is in high school). GIGANT seems to be a romance between the two. Considering that this age gap is already an uncomfortable one, what does it say that a lot of Rei's behavior (like looking up information about her personal life online) borders on stalking? All of these things are framed with no sense of understanding as to what constitutes acceptable behavior and what does not, and it makes it apparent that Hiroya Oku's empathy only goes so far as to not impede the real reason this manga exists: to get the self-insert with the woman he's attracted to, regardless of how it violates boundaries and ethics, to make her a giant because the author finds it sexy and to revel in disparate sci-fi gibberish.

Hiroya Oku's work affects authenticity, a candid, bleak realism, to justify its core of fetishistic wish-fulfillment. It would be one thing if his horny gigantism manga were just that, but instead it's also a look at adolescence and love that never squares away the fact that all this posturing is just an excuse to get the movie-obsessed nerd together with Chiho. Even with moments that surprised me and all the dreary verisimilitude in the world, this crux cannot be shifted, and it cannot be ignored. And it makes me dislike the manga even more.