As of the writing of this review, One Punch Man is more popular than Jesus Christ, as depicting an everyman turned hero with a limitless supply of power and invulnerability that sends evil back to its lifeless origin with a single wave of his hand is apparently more suited for comedy than for religious iconography, although the show may have accidentally generated the latter in its wake. See the man with the bald head and rounded white eyes, whose name and costume derives from a kid’s picture book hero from 1973, but don’t let his appearance fool you—with a single punch the heavens part, mountains are reduced to rubble and then to nothingness, and evil is eradicated from his sight. Well, not that he’s happy about it. After enough one-punch victories it’s no surprise he finds so little interest in monster fighting, a sentiment which the writers attached to their protagonist prominently to assure us that they will try and ensure we don’t have the same experience.
And thankfully it’s not an action show like the classic shounen works it parodies, but rather a comedy about an ordinary man named Saitama who was galvanized one day into hero work, but finds that an average training routine and three years of waiting have shaped him into an immortal killing machine, and with too average an appearance to stand out in spite of it. The world he lives in is an amalgamation of every monster-infested metropolis we’ve ever seen, raised to the 10th power, sectioned off into cities labeled only by name, where foreign invasions, while terrifying, rarely reach a level that exceeds local news stories.
Their claws can’t quite cut all the way through modern civilization, as hero work itself is a prominent position, working on a ranking system similar to the monsters themselves, or alternatively one for any run-of-the-mill pyramid scheme. Saitama enters as a C-class hero—the bottom of the totem pole—due to his poor written exam scores, and due to happenstance and his ordinary appearance rarely stands out enough to rise in rank despite saving the world on numerous occasions. By contrast, his hot robot disciple Genos takes the test with Saitama and ends up being immediately ranked S-class, an unprecedented feat which, while completely deserved, is insulting in the face of his master. Ditto the volume of fan letters showing up at their door every day.
The comedy is mostly verbal and overlaid on top of almost non-stop action as Saitama (and Genos) repel wave after wave of increasingly stronger existential threats. There is certainly anime power creep pervasive in One Punch Man…for the enemies, as Saitama has no place to grow, and any level of enemy is equal in the face of his single punch. One Punch Man knows that the moment Saitama struggles against an enemy, the comedy is lost, and so his appearances on the scene are cleverly spaced out to allow for real action scenes between the heroes and the monsters, and then at the oddest timing possible he appears to end the fight without breaking his deadpan stare and casual demeanor. There are times, like the last three episodes, where this formula becomes slightly overbearing, as the music swells and everything resembles a normal action show, something the show really only does well in a campy sense, playing to the nostalgia all the action shows that have come before. Saitama’s end of things is pretty amusing as he singlehandedly destroys an alien spaceship and confronts an intergalactic menace in an encounter that boils down to flashing lights and the alien yelling attack names before the eventual punch comes. Actually he takes three punches to finish, which for the circumstance was necessary and plausible but to a degree still inexcusable.
Unfortunately that is the only example I can quote, as I have long since forgotten all characters other than Saitama and Genos and all arcs before the finale. When I finish writing my review I suspect even the finale will have faded from my mind. The show’s joke is funny to be sure, and the joke itself is memorable, but the delivery disappears faster than it arrived. The other characters, who would have been a strong supporting cast in a different show, can only play second or third fiddle to Saitama for the joke to work, but as a result they could have been anyone and the show would be the same. I laughed at One Punch Man. I enjoyed its action scenes, its writing, and the world it created. Now that it’s over and all that has evaporated, I have no particular desire to go back and see what it was I found entertaining. It has so little aftertaste I can only sit and wonder why I spent four hours watching it if four hours of enjoyment was all I ended up getting.