Zetman : Human or hero ?

Hello again and welcome back to my blog, sadly tho, this will be my last post ! I know, tragic. I thought for a while about what manga I should speak about as the last one. I could've gone with my favorite or even end without any particular changes. I ended up thinking I'll just speak about the last manga I read and finished yesterday, 

Zetman.

Zetman is a manga written and illustrated by Masakazu Katsura. It was supposed to be a 49 page one-shot but ended up getting a full fledged series of 20 tomes. 

The plot is a bit hard to explain, it's got a lot of plot twist and leaves you in the dark for the majoritiy of it's start, leaving you to wonder who's right and who's wrong, who's a traitor and who's an ally. Zetman touches on the subject of love and friendship a lot, it's almost the center of the manga. Jin is a kid that has the power to transform into Zetman, a super powerful hero, but he is human, so will he pick to be a hero and save other by sacrificing his own personal life ? Or will he live as a human and fight for his close friends and family only ? 

As much as it sounds like a fighting type manga once again, there's surprisingly not that much. It's mostly about angst and how specific characters would react to certain events. Can a human fall in love with another human that transforms into a monster when it fights ? At first most people would say yes if they truly loved him but I feel like it's a bit harder to pick when you haven't actually went through the event. 

Since the manga talks about human emotions, the mangaka had to transcribe human's emotion onto a drawing, which can be hard at time but here it's perfect. The style of drawings are a bit old since the manga ended in 2015 but it somehow still holds up to me and looks really nice. 

Those are just amazing, I don't even know what more to say about it ! The characters go through so much and yet somehow keep on fighting for their loved ones, it's almost impressive. As for the main character, the fact he's the kindest and most humane character goes really well with the contrast of him being this genetically modified human without a heart. 

Another really good point is the monster's design ! Since Zetman has to fight villains, they went for a bug like monster in the first part with the weakest characters 

But as Zetman goes against stronger foes, his opponent look more and more godly and demonic, even fighting against his old friend that is supposed to be the image of "Justice"

Degel and Anvil, two characters who were one but ended up getting cut in half, Degel getting the strength, Anvil getting the brain. 

Zet and Koga (the symbol of justice) fighting to know who's the true hero.

Sadly, the ending of Zetman is really strange, it ends on a sort of ending where a lot of questions are left unanswered and some character's future aren't exposed, leaving us in this vague state of satisfaction with a last panel only saying : 

I was a bit confused when I arrived there, thinking that there'd be a follow up somewhere but...nothing. Since 2015 Masakazu Katsura hasn't worked on anything but a small collaboration with the mangaka Akira Toriyama ( the creator of dragon ball) which ended in 2019. It's what you call a bitter sweet ending. It leaves you hungry for more but I think you're mostly happy that it happened. It's also how my blog will end, bitter sweet with a last post that doesn't really got anything special to it, but I think it's for the best !

Thanks for reading all of these posts and goodbye ! 💜