I started this series over ten years ago, but didn't have access to the last couple dozen volumes. Now my local library has all 37 volumes in a 12-book omnibus set so I'm going to start from the beginning and make another go at reading the whole thing.

A couple of Japanese high school students seem to die while rescuing a drunken man from the subway tracks, but instead of any of the traditional concepts of an afterlife, they find themselves teleported to a small apartment with a number of other people and locked in with a giant sphere called Gantz that sends them on timed and rated missions to capture or destroy aliens around Tokyo. There is much confusion among the abducted folks, leading to much death and violence as they blunder through their first mission. Exciting action and gore abound.

Unfortunately, fan service also abounds and the appearance of nude teenage girl quickly brings out the worst in some of the male characters, leading to rape attempts and sexual assault. By the end of the book, cheesecake pin-ups of her introduce each chapter, a practice that continues in the next omnibus.

Despite that, I'm intrigued by the nightmarish scenario the characters are cast into and the execution of the action scenes. And since individual chapters zip by so quickly, these big omnibus collections feel like a much more satisfactory chunk of the story than the little volumes I originally started reading a decade ago.

FOR REFERENCE:

Omnibus collecting Gantz volumes 1-3.

Contents: Volume 1, Chapters 1-10 -- Volume 2, Chapters 11-22 -- Volume 3, Chapters 23-34 ( )

There is a very brief section with nudity, and the rest of it is fighting. I absolutely love the concept, but the execution leaves a little to be desired. The idea is to resurrect citizens who have just died and have them fight a series of aliens. They get points and can win special weapons and even retire and go back to the land of living. There's so many ways to go, but what it became was just one monster after another and another. The monsters became bigger and the fights got longer. So much could have been made of the characters and the groups fighting in different cities. I read the comics, watched the TV series and the movies, but they tend to go over the same stuff over and over again. ( )