I'll be away on vacation for some of this week and some of next week. If you search diligently for clues, you can probably figure out where! (Example: I have a signing at Meltdown on Saturday.)

I re-read all 21 volumes-so-far of GANTZ yesterday in scanlations. Brain: fried. (It's a story about kids who "die" but then are brought to a special room, given weapons, presented with "aliens" and left to their own devices. It has lots of gore, boobs, psychological trauma, and a massive body count of innocent bystanders. And it's all presented in a fairly realistic visual style. It's in what I call the Psychic War genre, with superhero overtones.)

I hope to god that someday people start writing about this series with an eye to subtext, etc, because all I see is kids talking about how awesome it is and speculating about what happens next. It is a deeply messed-up story, and to see the fans approaching it surface-only is troubling. For example: the "coolest" character in the second half of the story-to-date starts out by perpetrating a massacre of hundreds of innocent people in a crowded downtown area, after which... what? He fights "bad guys" after that, alongside our "heroes", but I'm not exactly rooting for him. This uneasy balance goes on for something like 9 volumes.

Dark Horse is supposed to start putting out translated volumes this summer, and best of luck to them.

Discussion questions:

1. Does GANTZ's author, Hiroyu Oka, know that he's putting in all this subtext? Or is he just a soulless, dispassionate sociopath like the majority of his characters?

2. What defines the Psychic War genre? (Some other examples: Bleach, X/1999, X-Men)