Punch 1
Title: "One Punch" (一撃/Ichigeki)
Pages: 22
Adapts: Chapter 1 of the original web comic
The Japanese version can be viewed for free up on the Young Jump website here.
In Short: The
start, of course. A guy who looks suspiciously
similar to Anpanman fights a guy who looks suspiciously similar to Baikinman. He wins.
Quickly.
Milestones: It’s
the introduction of Saitama, though he’s not named at this point. Also the debut of the unfortunate City-A, the
first of the series’ alphabet cities. A
school child wears a shirt that says “School Child”, a type of joke that’s
going to pop up a lot in future.
Adaptation Notes:
It’s the first chapter of the remake, and so adapts the first chapter of the
original. Simple enough. Actually, it’s the second remake of the first chapter.
Murata first knocked up a rough draft as a proof of concept, and this
version is still viewable as Extra #1 on the Young Jump site. It’s a page-for-page, almost panel-for-panel
remake of the original (and credits the artwork to “Two”, in keeping with One’s
pen name). In contrast, the actual Young Jump chapter expands the original 15 pages out to 22, mostly thanks to
a generous helping of two-page spreads.
There’s no actual changes to the story or dialogue, but we see a bit
more of Vaccine Man’s attack on the city…including a shot inside a subway train,
which features a sly ad for One’s other Young Jump series, Makai no Ossan.
Vaccine Man’s giant monster form looks almost completely
different between the original, the rough draft remake, and the final Young Jump
version. Saitama’s costume is also bulkier and
less form-fitting in the rough draft.
The joke with the school child wearing a shirt that says “School Child”
was only added for the Young Jump chapter, and wasn’t present in the original or rough
draft (but as already noted, similar jokes are present at other points throughout
the original). The school child also
looks quite a bit older in the finished Young Jump version.
Translation Notes:
Even in the Japanese version, the “School Child” shirt really does say “School
Child” in English (other shirt jokes throughout the series typically involve
Japanese words written with alphabet letters).
Saitama introduces himself as 趣味でヒーローをやっている者だ. Now, 趣味/shumi means “hobby” or “pastime”,
so you could translate this as “someone whose pastime is being a hero”. However, hobby/pastime implies something one
does on the side, in addition to their day job, but we see later on that
Saitama at this stage is unemployed and does nothing other than his hero
activities. Perhaps because of this, the
Viz translations opts to word this as “someone who’s a hero for fun”, which sounds
a bit odd at first but probably describes Saitama best.
Other Notes:
The series’ title and Saitama’s whole appearance is a joke on Anpanman, a
long-running Japanese picture book series by Takashi Yanase, adapted into a
likewise long-running anime series. An
anpan is a Japanese jam-filled sweet roll, and Anpanman is a superhero with one
of these rolls for a head (yes, really) who patrols the city looking for
starving people and others in trouble.
Whenever he finds someone in need of food, he offers them his head to
eat (I swear I’m not making this up), then gets his creator “Uncle Jam” to bake
him another head. As you might expect of
someone with a pastry for a head, Anpanman doesn’t have any hair, and wears a
red bodysuit with yellow gloves, boots, and belt, plus a dark red cape. In other words, Saitama’s appearance matches
Anpanman’s pretty closely, except with the red and yellow flipped, and a white
cape instead of a dark one.
Since “One-Punch Man” in Japanese is written as ワンパンマン/Wanpanman,
the connection’s pretty obvious. What’s
more, the English word “punch” in Japanese is normally written パンチ/panchi,
so the fact that One shortened it to “pan” makes it even clearer what he had in
mind. Although on that note, in Punch 28
after Saitama beats Sea King, a bystander declares that he did it in ワンパン/wanpan,
“one punch”. But this is probably just a
self-referential joke, since near as I can tell (after 10 whole seconds of
Google) Japanese people don’t typically say “wanpan” to mean “one punch”.
In turn, Anpanman’s nemesis is Baikinman, “Germ Man”, a
purple alien with antennae, insect wings, and a devil’s tail. He comes from the Germ Planet and wants to
wipe out the human race with germs. So
the joke is that Vaccine Man is the opposite of Baikinman (a vaccine rather
than a germ) but he still wants to wipe out humanity, for different
reasons. Though Vaccine Man lacks the
tail and wings, he’s got the antennae and so basically looks like a muscular
version of Baikinman (but it’s got to be said, the combination of antennae,
pointy ears, and beefy build makes him also look an awful lot like Piccolo from
Dragon Ball).
Also, the way in which Anpanman has to go to his creator
Uncle Jam for new heads is rather similar to how Genos has to go to Professor
Kuseno for new parts. A stretch? OK, maybe a little…
Characters
Saitama: As
already noted, he’s not named at this point.
In fact, we don’t get any information on him here beyond his standard “hero
for fun” self-introduction (even Vaccine Man thinks this is a stupid backstory). Seeing a TV report on the crisis in City-A,
he heads out there immediately to “enforce justice”. He arrives just in time to rescue a small child
from Vaccine Man’s clutches, listens without interest to Vaccine Man’s ranting,
then kills the monster with one punch.
Despite the victory, he’s furious that yet another of his fights has
ended in just one punch. Viola! The basic premise of the series.
In fact, we never see Saitama get this upset over his
easy victories again (yelling profanities and all that), so they might still be
a relatively new development at this point.
It would make sense for the series to start just as Saitama’s new-found omnipotence
is really starting to get on his nerves.
It’s possible that after this he begrudgingly accepts that nobody’s
going to be a challenge for him anymore: compare his shouting here to his subdued
reaction to Marugori in Punch 3.
In Punch 9, Saitama says that he’s pretty much always late
to disasters, which fits with what we see here: he only turns up after Vaccine
Man has destroyed much of City-A. And in
Chapter 97 of the original web comic, Saitama says he’s spent the last 2~3
years watching nothing but the weather channel and the “disaster channel” (so odds
are that’s what he’s watching when he sees the report on City-A). Despite Saitama being portrayed as extremely
poor later on in the series (with only 20 yen in his bank account in the side
story “What Can’t Be Bought”), here his apartment has a rather nice TV and even
a laptop. There’s also a small piggy
bank by his TV, probably a reference to the monster from the side-story “200
Yen”.
Vaccine Man:
The “Earth’s apostle”, a creature created by the “will of the Earth” in order
to destroy human civilization. Or so he
says. According to him, the Earth itself
is a living organism, and because they constantly create pollution, human
beings are nothing but a virus endangering the Earth’s life. His purpose then is to wipe out the human “virus”
(hence the name “Vaccine Man”), and he makes a start of it by attacking
City-A. He’s shown to fire energy
attacks that look quite similar to the kind of stuff you get in Dragon Ball, Yu
Yu Hakusho, and countless other series, and he’s even surrounded by a rather
Super Saiyan-like aura in one panel.
Though normally human-sized, he can shape-shift: first he
transforms his right hand into a huge claw to attack a small child, then he
turns into a gigantic tusked monster to fight Saitama. He’s presumably stronger in his giant monster
form, yet he’s still reduced to bloody chunks by just one punch from Saitama. Personality-wise, he takes his mission to
annihilate humanity quite seriously, and is angry that Saitama opposes him
simply “for fun”. He seems to transform
into his giant monster form purely out of anger towards Saitama (but it’s
possible he also senses Saitama’s strength and beefs up accordingly, like
Carnage Kabuto does later on).
Besides being similar to standard issue manga/anime ki
attacks, Vaccine Man’s powers are quite similar to Homeless Emperor’s “light
power”, as first seen in Chapter 64. And
Homeless Emperor also talks about being given his power to wipe out humanity,
who he calls nothing but a foolish plague upon the Earth. Coincidence?
In fact, if anything Vaccine Man says is true, this should have a big
impact upon the rest of the series. If
nothing else, we might expect the Earth to create more Vaccine Men after the
first one’s death, but so far this hasn’t happened (maybe Homeless Emperor’s
the replacement?) Perhaps all this talk
of the Earth having it out for humanity is why monster attacks are becoming
more and more frequent (a recurring theme throughout the series), and maybe it
also has something to do with Shibabawa’s grand prophesy that the “Earth’s in
danger”.
Punch 39 implies that Saitama’s victory over Vaccine Man
is one of the heroic deeds incorrectly attributed to King.
Locations
City-A: A
city. Much of it gets destroyed by Vaccine
Man (but presumably not all of it, since there’s no sign of damage by the time
it reappears in Punch 30). As we’ll see,
all of the cities throughout the series are simply named after alphabet
letters, so appropriately enough City-A is the first example of that. From Punch 30 onwards, City-A is established
as the site of the Hero Association’s main headquarters, but that distinctive
black building is nowhere to be seen in this chapter. Still, if we wanted to we could pretend
Vaccine Man specifically targets the city because he’s after the Hero
Association (as Sky King does in Punch 31).
Most likely though, the city’s just a magnet for trouble (see Punch 32).
Saitama gets there pretty quickly after seeing the news
report on the attack. It’s later
established he lives in City-Z, which you’d naturally think would be pretty far
away, but maybe that just shows how fast he is (in Chapters 96, it doesn’t
seem to take Saitama very long to simply walk from City-Z to City-A).
It's voilà, not viola (that's a musical instrument).
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