Last year, we lost Akira Toriyama, whose creation Dragon Ball remains the most influential Shonen manga of all time, paving the way for the Big Three of manga: Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. Given that the number of volumes spawned out of these titles, Viz Media has published the 3-in-1 paperback editions for all of them. And now Viz is giving the 3-in-1 treatment to Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter x Hunter, which has been ongoing since 1998.
Published around the same time as the aforementioned Big Three, Hunter x Hunter always felt like an anomaly compared to most Shonen titles. Years before this series, Togashi had done his Dragon Ball-styled Shonen series with YuYu Hakusho, which embraced the conventions that you associate with the Battle Shonen, from power-ups to tournament arcs. Although Togashi concluded YuYu Hakusho sooner than expected, due to personal and professional reasons, Hunter x Hunter was made to deconstruct the tropes of the genre.
From the first couple of chapters, Hunter x Hunter opens like any other Shonen series by introducing Gon Freecss, a young boy who seems to bond well with most wild animals, yearns to go out on an adventure. Upon discovering that his father, Ging, who left Gon at a young age, is actually a world-renowned Hunter – a licensed professional who specializes in locating rare or unidentified animal species, treasure hunting, surveying unexplored enclaves, and hunting criminals – Gon departs on a journey to become a Hunter and find his father. As he departs from his home of Whale Island – whose silhouette is literally shaped like a whale – Gon meets and befriends other applicants, such as Kurapika and Leorio, each with their own reason to take the Hunter Exam.
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What initially struck me from this initial arc occurs during the third chapter, in which Gon and Co. meet the Quizzing Lady, one of the examiners in the preliminary phase of the exam as she gives candidates quizzes before they could proceed to the next phase. As she asks them a dilemmatic quiz that they have to answer in five seconds, they remain silent as not answering is the correct answer to the dilemma. However, the Lady notes that Gon had the right mentality to the question, in that the trivial abstraction now could become reality, and one must be prepared to make the choice then. Not only does this set up the puzzle solving that defines this arc, it also foreshadows that the physical and psychological challenges that our characters will confront throughout the series.
Again, there is more puzzle solving than actual fighting, with our heroes navigating various stages where they have to rely on their wits and teamwork, despite the nuisance of other applicants, most notably Tonpa, the self-proclaimed Rookie Crusher who takes great pleasure in the failures of new examinees. However, newcomers to the world of Hunter x Hunter may be shocked by the level of violence, with a number of applicants losing their lives, either by the various stages of the Exam, or even themselves. The two notable characters to reflect the book’s violence are Hisoka, a deceitful and narcissistic magician with an affinity towards murder, and Killua, a member of a notorious assassin family who ends up becoming friends with Gon as they are both around the same age.
As for Togashi’s art, this is where things can get divisive. While he shows a wide range of character designs which lean harder to cartoonish caricatures as oppose to the cast of YuYu Hakusho, there are pages where the action is sketchy and relying a lot on white backgrounds. Unlike Eiichiro Oda’s work on One Piece which uses a ton of visual information in its illustrations, Togashi takes a more simplistic approach with a great deal of dialogue doing most of the storytelling, with the occasional striking image, particularly the moments of shocking violence. Although Togashi’s art would improve in subsequent volumes where he gets to experiment more, his biggest strength at this point is his nuanced writing that takes characters that could be Shonen archetypes and twist them to unpredictable, but fun directions.
While newbies may be unsure about this series from its art and tonal whiplashes, the first of these 3-in-1 Editions is a great entry point for anyone getting into Hunter x Hunter.This series is doing something besides than the typical fighting showdowns you would expect from Battle Shonen manga.
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