Here’s a little explanation about my tastes. While I’m not generally a fan of crime stories, I’m a sucker for any genre story that casts bad guys as the protagonists. DIRTY DOZEN, SUICIDE SQUAD, THUNDERBOLTS, KILL BILL, the RIDDICK movies… and so on and so on. Adventures can just seem so… unadventurous when you’re watching the Hero With 1000 Faces plod through the monomyth yet again. I love the unpredictability of these sorts of stories because most (if not all) bets are off and there’s legit suspense about how a particular character’s going to act during your usual moral conundrum. Plus, it’s endlessly amusing to watch psychopaths lock horns.
Granted, Ganta’s innocent, but he turned around into the sort of badass who’d knock a bully into a spike pit with a gym ball far faster than the countless callow heroes I’ve seen in seen in any anime. (The fact that his voice actor sounds a lot like Renton’s makes that an even richer treat.) Likewise, I love how his love interest is a batshit-insane, borderline-suicidal psychopath and I got the biggest kick out of the TKD champion’s whole deranged spiel about how everybody must kneel and laugh at him like some totally f’ed up line of retainers.
We are in the heart of the asylum, here, and the inmates are in control. Oh, absolutely! I look at SUPERJAIL as being like seeing a triple max prison designed by Willy Wonka, and I suppose this is sort of like the more realistic vision of that. Or maybe it’s like doing the feature length version of some normal Joe getting thrown into Murderworld from X-MEN. Either way, I’m having the most ghoulishly, most diabolically good time over all this black humor.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand… because of all that, the moment where Ganta chooses to essentially sacrifice himself to save Shiro was far more moving. Like I keep saying, it’s rhythm, balance and contrast that makes all the different components of a story hit so much harder than they would if the mood’s monotone. Based on your warnings, this show might have the potential to botch a promising and ambitious start like [C] – CONTROL did - - but hey, at least for now, I’m having a hell of a time!
Watch this episode, "Antidote -Candy-” below and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode here.
Tom Pinchuk’s a writer and personality with a large number of comics, videos and features like this to his credit. Visit his website - - tompinchuk.com - - and follow his Twitter: @tompinchuk
