One-Punch Man Review

The premise removes tension on purpose and the book keeps finding things to do without it. Saitama is unbeatable and bored, so the drama is displaced onto everyone else: heroes with rankings and reputations to protect, monsters who believe they are threats, and an association that is mostly a bureaucracy. Genos, King and Garou each carry stretches of the story Saitama cannot, and the Garou material is the best writing in the run because it takes the question of what a hero is and hands it to somebody who actually loses.

Murata's art is the reason this version exists. The layouts, the sense of scale and the destruction are drawn at a level of detail that should be impossible at any serialisation speed, and several double page spreads are worth the volume on their own. The satire thins as the fights get longer, and the habit of redrawing earlier arcs has made the release schedule unreliable. Read it for the craft. Nothing else pairs a joke this simple with drawing this good.