Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2015
Feb. 22nd, 2023 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLooking back at when I tried to identify “personal standout anime” for 2015, I was struck by a certain show of struggling to proclaim a specific overall pick from a limited number of options. That current mood of surprise just might have been played up through already having gone back to the first episode of One Punch Man. Even though I’ve only watched its first block of episodes on seeing complaints the follow-up had been handed to a less impressive studio, I felt quite willing now to return to what I’d seen.
In some ways, the first episode of One Punch Man did have me thinking now “it would take an awful lot to keep up with this level of animation.” So far as the story the animation was in service of, it set up the fundamental joke of the series, that the “hero for fun” Saitama has become too powerful (and lost his hair in the process) and is detaching from life in general now that even the largest monster laying waste to whole cities can be vanquished with a single blow. It does steer past what I think of as the more familiar superhero spoofs, “the utterly pompous hero who’s utterly unaware of that” and “the unimpressive hero who’s all too aware of that.” (There are at least a few spoofs that amount to “the looney-tunes cartoon character as superhero,” too.)
I was quite content to go on to the One-Punch Man manga (and before I was in the “maybe it’s not safe to wait ‘for later’” place that nudged me towards other long-deferred titles, too), but perhaps confronting this series again has me pondering “superheroes over here.” Having managed to keep up with anime and anime-adjacent manga for whatever reason (some of which I pull back from articulating) might be a distraction from reading respectable fiction and viewing respectable films (probably older) and long-format TV series, but I suppose there was always the possibility my pastimes might not be that far away from “the usual standard nowadays.”
In some ways, the first episode of One Punch Man did have me thinking now “it would take an awful lot to keep up with this level of animation.” So far as the story the animation was in service of, it set up the fundamental joke of the series, that the “hero for fun” Saitama has become too powerful (and lost his hair in the process) and is detaching from life in general now that even the largest monster laying waste to whole cities can be vanquished with a single blow. It does steer past what I think of as the more familiar superhero spoofs, “the utterly pompous hero who’s utterly unaware of that” and “the unimpressive hero who’s all too aware of that.” (There are at least a few spoofs that amount to “the looney-tunes cartoon character as superhero,” too.)
I was quite content to go on to the One-Punch Man manga (and before I was in the “maybe it’s not safe to wait ‘for later’” place that nudged me towards other long-deferred titles, too), but perhaps confronting this series again has me pondering “superheroes over here.” Having managed to keep up with anime and anime-adjacent manga for whatever reason (some of which I pull back from articulating) might be a distraction from reading respectable fiction and viewing respectable films (probably older) and long-format TV series, but I suppose there was always the possibility my pastimes might not be that far away from “the usual standard nowadays.”