The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Thunder 3

What's It About? 

Pyontaro is a middle schooler whose little sister, Futaba, simply adores him. One day, he and his buddies—the so-called “Small Three”—decide to watch a weird disc their teacher lent them. Little do the boys realize this disc is linked to another universe...and while they aren't looking, Futaba gets sucked in! Can Pyontaro and his friends find Futaba? And just what is this other world they've discovered?!

Thunder 3 has a story and art by Yuki Ikeda, with English translation by Cat Anderson. Published by Vertical Comics (November 5, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

Sometimes when reading random books for manga guide, I find myself lost for words. I went into Yuki Ikeda's Thunder3 without knowledge or preconceptions and was rewarded with one of the most unpredictable, bat-shit mental manga stories I've ever read. The WTF-O-Meter is so far off the chart with this one, that the only responses I could initially muster were confused noises of disbelief mixed with paroxysms of deranged laughter. This shit is wild.

Thunder3 is not a manga that can be judged on its opening chapter alone, which reads like a 1980s throwback kids' school comedy manga, except the tone is ever-so-slightly off. Pyontaro seems like a fairly normal kid – he lives with his loving parents and overly affectionate little sister who bugs him constantly, demanding his attention and insisting on sharing his bed. (I had a little sister like this, I can fully empathize.) He's best friends with the two neighboring boys, and at school, he's unpopular with the girls. To assuage his frustration he draws boobs in his schoolbooks and looks at porn on his smartphone. So far, so slice of life. But everything is completely upended once he opens the portal to another world, and his sister goes missing. Not only does Pyontaro suddenly realize how much he loves her and desperately wants to find her, he embarks on a journey into a world strangely familiar yet unsettlingly different from his own.

I'm extremely hesitant to spoil too many of Thunder3's surprises, which tumble off the pages constantly like drunken teenagers following their first taste of hard liquor, the premise becoming even more unhinged and detached from reality with each chapter. The Little Three stand out like sore thumbs in the other world, for reasons that become obvious, while the art style shifts dramatically from simplistic to terrifyingly (often hilariously) detailed. This bizarre juxtaposition of themes and aesthetics is like if Doraemon, Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction and Gantz were all smooshed together in a blender with absinthe and set alight. I don't know what the hell Ikeda's plan is for his gleefully demented manga, but I am here for this brand of nonsense. Nothing, not even alien invasions, mind-controlled militias, nor unkillable, indestructible super-deformed manga characters can stop me from picking up subsequent volumes.

Thunder 3 is another in my perennial favorite genre of titles I pick out of the Manga Guide hat: the "Where is this going, exactly?" story. The initial setup of this manga's 80-page opening chapter is meant to look as innocuous as possible, and it was, until I started honing in on the sheer number of narrative tropes that were conspiring around the main trio of Pyontaro and pals. It's Valentine's Day, there's a new transfer student coming in, and their teacher just happens to be talking up multiverse theory? Where is this going, exactly? Thankfully, it feels like just the right amount of time before Thunder 3 does show its hand, with plenty following up after that just in this first volume.

Once all the stuff in Thunder 3 starts happening, it shifts from the intriguing intro to quite the brisk page-turner. Technically the story is pretty simple, being something of a Labyrinth setup where Pyontaro's little sister gets herself whisked away into an alternate world that the boys have to head into to rescue her. It's the nature of this alternate world that's the hook though—put aside the obvious jokes about the horror of being trapped in a PlayStation 5, and the sheer scope of what Yuki Ikeda's used the medium to create here becomes its own spectacle apart from the story. The marriage of the initial simplified art style with the dense photo-referenced backgrounds and realistic detailed people is executed in a way that continuously surprises the reader with what Ikeda draws and how. The abstract oddity and horror is turned up by the presence of aliens, standing out in layers of stylization. At times the level of detail seems almost overwhelming, though that's almost certainly the intention. It's calculated presentation, shown off in the number of double-page spreads indulged in throughout the book.

At first glance it seems like it might be a one-off experiment, but by the end of this opening volume it's clear that Thunder 3 is only just getting started. The action's escalating effectively, for one, whether it be the spectacle of some cartoon kids launching off into some Superman shenanigans, or the simple entertainment of watching some arrogant aliens get clowned on by a tiny anime girl. And the metatextual layers to the series' conceit means there are a lot of places it could go as it continues, exploring what "stories" are from different perspectives. But mostly, Thunder 3 is worth checking out just to see its idea in action.