So after completing my third read though of Gantz, my favorite manga, I decided to familiarize myself with more of Hiroya Oku’s work. After all if Gantz is my favorite manga, surely I would at least be somewhat interested in his other material. So I started reading Hen and I was quite surprised how different this title is from Gantz. Gantz in case you aren’t familiar with it is a horror, sci-fi, action drama that is really ambicious in both its scale and scope. Hen on the other hand is almost as far from that as possible. In the case of Hen we see a slower paced slice of life drama with comedic elements. The the setting is almost entirely limited to a high school, and the size and scope of the story is decidedly narrower.That being said, I feel the story had a lot of strengths for a work of this kind. Hen is a series that was first serialized in Weekly Young Jump. The original run lasted from 1988 – 1992. So this series actually pre dates my birth, a fun fact which makes copies of this work a bit of a hassle to track down in English. Read More…