One Punch Man is an anime where nothing bad ever happens to any monsters!


  How nice!!!

CRABLANTE

  This guy is the first monster the hero ever faces, and his design is still memorably weird. A big buff man with a crablike exoskeleton only from exactly the waist up, with normal human legs and a presumably normal human groin behind his briefs. Do you like this being the first image on this page? Do you like how big it is?? Crablante's head is a simple chitinous bullet shape with human lips, but his stalked crab eyes are EXTRA tall and cartoonish. Threatening to peel a guy apart with his claws almost the moment he's introduced, the contrast between his level of menace and his visual absurdity perfectly sets the stage for the tone of this whole series, I say as someone who's only watched or read select bits and pieces.

VENUS MANTRAP

  I'm not going in a special order and I'm not aiming to be thorough. This is just a selection of my favorite designs, and still not every single design that I like, so we're jumping right to Venus Man-trap, who I think only appeared for like a panel or two. While fly-trap monsters and big-jawed plants are a dime a dozen in fiction, this one has a body plan I've genuinely never seen anywhere else! Like not even once! The "torso" has a jagged flytrappy mouth down the front, standing atop a bunch of tentacle-root legs, which is all fairly conventional, but there's a cute little knob-shaped head on top, with nothing but a pair of round, blank white eyes, and then there's a whole fly-trap "upper jaw" sprouting straight out of the top of this, like a huge pikmin leaf, which can presumably close shut against the two additional jaws it has for arms. That's SUCH a cool and novel layout!

BUILDING BOOPER

  This guy is a "detonator," like one of those dynamite plunger things from old cartoons, but with clawed arms and legs, a jaggedy-toothed mouth and one eye. I think he's also seen for just one panel of the manga, but you can infer a lot about his abilities and even personality from what has to be the funniest name ever given to a being with this particular skillset.

EYESIGHT

  That's a pretty cool name for a medusa! Very evocative! And her design may be "just" a sexy snake-tailed woman, but there are lots of great little touches that stand out. The metallic cobras wrapped around her arms, positioned exactly so their hoods act as pauldrons? Awesome! The way her snake hear is threaded through the eye sockets of multiple human skulls she's wearing on her head? Extremely awesome. And how about the skull that's bisected in half, with its jaws open, to frame the eyeball-like gem on her forehead?!

NYAN

  Likewise, you can say this guy is simply a "humanoid cat," but it's all about the execution. The relatively normal, adorable kitty cat head on a tall, lean human body is at least a little unsettling, and becomes downright terrifying with his outrageously long, thin claws.

EVIL EYE

  This guy was once human, but the eyes of countless other monsters were implanted in his flesh, giving him telekinetic powers fueled by a collective grudge. The process also made him a lot bigger than a normal human, too. He wears a cloak that ominously hides his entire face and body, but exposes his clawed, eye-covered forearms, which is a lot like the female yokai Dodomeki.

POISON LIZARD SISTERS

  Raptora and Reptera are a couple of extremely badass looking reptilian women with spiky street punk fashion sense and 80's hair who also happen to be extremely poisonous. I haven't seen the episode or chapter containing these two beautiful and awesome character designs, but I wish them the very best.

GUMS

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ENAMEL

  We know absolutely nothing about this monster except that he resembles a single large tooth, with sunken zombie-like eyes, a jagged mouth and the word "enamel" written on his front. I just like him.

DEMONIC FAN

  This is interestingly categorized as one of the "mysterious beings," ie "monsters" of the series, but appears to be a machine, maybe, resembling a giant three-bladed fan, like a regular household desk fan, with four robotic legs. We can't honestly be certain what it is, because even when demolished, its bits and pieces reassemble around the fan like the whole thing is more of a magnetic or telekinetic entity. One that, for some reason, occupies a big fan as its vessel and really really wants to kill people.

OROCHI

  This is a big deal guy who lead the Monster Association (that's a whole thing) for a while. He was originally all condensed into a more human shape, but it turns out he's more of a John Carpenter's The Thing sort of body-part mass that can shapeshift and mutate and absorb other monsters. He has no consistent shape in his "true" unleashed appearance except the fact that, like his namesake, he tends to make a lot of serpent-like heads.

  Orochi is reduced to just his "heart" at one point, though, which gains spooky little eye sockets and vestigial embryonic snake heads from its arteries, so, that feels like kind of a glance at his true inner self, perhaps.

GYORO GYORO

  For a while, it seemed like the real brains behind the Monster Association was this big soft puffy humanoid with one giant eye for a face and a bunch of little two-fingered arms for "hair," actually bearing JUST enough resemblance to Backbeard that it might be a subtle homage.

  It eventually turns out though that "Gyoro Gyoro" isn't a real entity at all, but a mindless organic puppet controlled by Psykos, a psychic woman who conducts various experiments in monster creation and qualifies as a monster herself, which brings us to a fairly interesting bit of worldbuilding I neglected to mention up to this point: some people in this setting are just humans with superpowers, and can be either heroes or villains. But other people in this setting become "monsters" under various circumstances, usually triggered by some sort of mental break or unhealthy obsession. A monster, as we've seen, can have any physical form and powers imaginable, which typically reflect their state of mind during the change. Something about this transformation also removes any moral inhibitions they ever had, unfortunately, and drives them to crave violence.

So Psykos may appear to be nothing but a human woman who happens to have telekinesis, but she's not the same kind of phenomenon as a regular super-human.

  When Orochi starts rebuilding his form, Psykos is absorbed in the process, but manages to hang on to her consciousness, and the result is a far deadlier and more impressive fusion of the two, often in an epic Go Nagai angel-demon sort of form with dozens of wing fins and a slimy naked Psykos sprouting out of its head. Pretty rad, yeah, and apparently capable of such exponential growth that Psykos speculates she could now literally become the entire planet. Like, with her big giant brain as its new core.

  Orochi and Psykos also become a really sick ass airplane for a bit. This might be at least 20% why I included them here, look at that thing.

KOMBUINFINITY

  This monster is human shaped, but as solid black as a shadow, save for veiny eyeballs and an almost Jack-O-Lantern smile that feel reminiscent of a Mizuki Shigeru or Hideshi Hino character. Kombu Infinity has an eerily calm personality and childlike voice, but his head bears dozens of tentacular kelp-like leaves strong enough to crush and slice through anything, and like all monsters, he has no remorse about his drive to murder humans. Despite appearing only briefly, he has an especially threatening presence and proves remarkably tough, though he's only dangerous so long as his leaves are intact.

MOSQUITO GIRL

  An early fan favorite and one of mine too, which I'm assuming is because everyone agrees with me about how cool and charming mosquitoes are! She has a mostly human form except that her human limbs extend into insectoid ones, she has a mosquito abdomen sprouting out of her lower back like a tail, she has wings, and she has the head of a giant mosquito growing out of her forehead, like a really awesome hat that can also impale people and drain all their blood! I also like the very long setae growing from her limbs and the two whip-like appendages that hang down from her temples like hair, which all contribute even more to a mosquito-ey appearance without actually being one-for-one mosquito characteristics. Plus, she has the stripey color scheme of actual tiger mosquitoes! Those are some of the largest, most painful mosquitoes that bite humans!

  Mosquito Girl can also control regular mosquitoes, and can direct them to inject her with any blood they've gathered. The more blood she can absorb, the stronger she gets, until she even powered up into a spinier, deadlier form. Even her hair whip things now have full blown claws on the ends!

It should be noted that it ALMOST looked as if Mosquito Girl was obliterated by the cruel and nefarious One Punch Man, but fans noticed a little twinkly star in the distance, which usually indicates that an anime villain has simply disappeared into the yonder distance, leading to years of speculation that she was in fact thriving somewhere.

AGGREGATION

  Speaking of swarming insects, Aggregation is treated as a single monster, but constitutes a huge black cloud of teeny tiny mutated insects! These insects appear to come in a variety of forms, but they can multiply by splitting apart and regenerating like individual cells. Really cool! I love the blurred line here between a monster character and a biological phenomenon.

UNIHORN

  An interesting weirdo! This humanoid has a tough ivory body surface, grooved in a pattern that spirals all the way up from his feet to the tip of his extremely long, tapering cranium, with eerie eyes peering out everywhere between these grooves. Even his mouth is just a gap in the spiral with a slightly crooked set of humanoid jaws. He has the bizarre ability to morph into a much longer spear shape, totally losing his humanoid limbs in the process while another monster wields him as a weapon! His Japanese name is literally also "one-horn," but the particular spelling also just makes it the word for narwhal, so his English name could have just been Narwhal, which I think would have been cooler and stranger.

RAFFLESIDON

  Japan's love of the giant rafflesia never gets old! Rafflesidon, like Vileplume, has a whole huge rafflesia blossom on top of his head, though his head is almost all he really has. It's a huge, gnarled, woody blob with a drooping, bulbous nose like an old man and glowing eyes in nearly vertical eye slits. Innumerable tentacles fan out from him in all directions, even resembling a beard or mustache beneath his nose, as if his whole form is just a fusion of vines. A real rafflesia doesn't have any roots or vines or stem of its own, of course, but grows parasitically on certain vines, so this design makes an exceptional amount of sense!

The real plant is known for smelling like a corpse, but Rafflesidon's aroma is basically a hypnotic sleeping gas.

EXPLOSIVE VELOCITY SNAIL

  This is the Explosive Velocity Snail. Pass it on to a friend or loved one for your velocities to be blessed with the good fortune of exploding!!!

DESTROCHLORIDIUM

  A Leucochloridium guy! That's my favorite animal!! He takes the form of an extremely tiny slimy-skinned humanoid with sharp teeth, big lips (thankfully drawn like actual human lips with corners, and not like a donut, if you know what I mean), snaily antennas, bulging chameleon-like eyes, and leucochloridium brood sacs for arms, which can morph into drills. Why can they morph into drills??? Because he's gotta get inside your skull somehow, duh! Then he can turn you into a zombie with big broodsac tentacle stalks on your head, naturally.

EVIL NATURAL WATER

  At one point, this was one of the greatest threats ever unleashed by the Monster Association: absolutely nothing more than a mass of mobile, amorphous water with a pair of eyeballs floating in it. It has no demonstrable personality or intelligence beyond its methodical killing drive and strategic use of its physical form, which can expand through any other water it comes into contact with until it ultimately becomes one with the entire ocean.

   I love everything about this concept. There's so little "to it," as either an idea or a design, but the bare bones formula makes for an amazingly scary antagonist with a very memorable look, especially when those eyeballs become kaiju-scale, floating just under the surface of a swelling seascape that craves murder.

SLUDGE JELLYFISH

  As a big nerd for toxic waste and pollution monsters, Sludge Jellyfish is probably tied with Destrochloridium and Mosquito Girl for my most favorite. He's shaped like a big jellyfish draped atop an armless, chunky humanoid torso, but his entire form is composed of the same dripping muck, Hedorah style, with staring eyeballs in a couple of dark gooey sockets. He's just so cute!!! I wish they had a little figure of him I could add to my toxic waste creature collection.