【Kinnikuman】Action x Comedy! One of the best children’s comedy manga’s out there, with over 77 million copies in circulation!!

Kinnikuman is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by the duo Yoshinori Nakai and Takashi Shimada, also know as Yudetamago.

The manga series was serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shounen Jump from 1979 to 1987. It’s chapters are compiled and collected into 76 separate volumes. As of 2021, the series had over 77 million copies in circulation, worldwide. Kinnikuman has won multiple awards, including the 30th Kodansha Manga Award for the best children manga. The Kinnikuman manga gave rise to a whole franchise of multiple spin-offs, anime and movies.

An anime television series adapted by Toei Animation was released in 1983, consisting of 137 episodes.

The story opens with a scene depicting over a hundred space creatures on their way to Earth. The signal is picked up by the Earth Defense Satellite and transmitted to Japanese government officials.

The defense organization's chief gives the order to contact the ultra brothers, but they appear to be on vacation. Every other hero they come into contact with is either on vacation or has some other commitment.

Then a comical brawl breaks out between the defense chief and his employee, as they argue about how they'll preserve the world from a threat of over a hundred space monsters arriving.

They have no choice but to contact Kinnikuman, the weakest hero of all.

He is teleported to the defence headquarters while eating lunch in his house, where the chief explains the entire situation. The chief begins to brief Kinnikuman on the monsters, and he appears confident that he can easily defeat them, but then becomes terrified after seeing a powerful monster.

Kinnikuman begins his 4 minute comical training, which he believes lasted 4 years.

As the space monsters approach Earth, Japan is evacuated, and Kinnikuman grows to enormous proportions by consuming garlic.

Now waiting for the space monsters to arrive, who according to calculations were supposed to arrive at 12 o’clock, Kinnikuman looks at the clock, which shows the time to be past 12. That is when the government receives another transmission from the defense satellite, indicating that the space monsters changed their minds and decided not to fight an idiot like Kinnikuman.

And thus he lives to fight another day.

What more foes will he face next?