It is said that in war you defend a hill for your country, but you take a hill for your buddies. More to the point, as war wears on, its issues become far more personal. The politics and grievances and organizing principles are discarded like shell casings and replaced by the need to survive, to save a life, to prove a point, to exact retribution. We go to war with a shared, expansive purpose, but we fight on far narrower ground.
So it is in Gantz, where the titanic struggle to save a planet from genocide at the hands of monstrous alien invaders inevitably draws down to those same singular drives. The Gantz warriors have seen everything they never imagined, have died and been regenerated time and again to return to the carnage, and each time the experience bores deeper into who they are until the big picture blurs, replaced by each warrior’s own picture.
And these drives are not the sole possession of humanity. The offworlders are not so different, as are the enemies in any conflict. The more we discover about our adversaries, the more we see of ourselves—as they see themselves in us. And maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of war, the inevitable realization in the face of death, destruction, and division that we are all the same.
Gantz Volume 34 goes on sale this Wednesday, February 4.
—Chris Warner
Senior Editor

It is said that in war you defend a hill for your country, but you take a hill for your buddies. More to the point, as war wears on, its issues become far more personal. The politics and grievances and organizing principles are discarded like shell casings and replaced by the need to survive, to save a life, to prove a point, to exact retribution. We go to war with a shared, expansive purpose, but we fight on far narrower ground.
 
So it is in Gantz, where the titanic struggle to save a planet from genocide at the hands of monstrous alien invaders inevitably draws down to those same singular drives. The Gantz warriors have seen everything they never imagined, have died and been regenerated time and again to return to the carnage, and each time the experience bores deeper into who they are until the big picture blurs, replaced by each warrior’s own picture.

And these drives are not the sole possession of humanity. The offworlders are not so different, as are the enemies in any conflict. The more we discover about our adversaries, the more we see of ourselves—as they see themselves in us. And maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of war, the inevitable realization in the face of death, destruction, and division that we are all the same.


—Chris Warner
Senior Editor