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It has been a long wait for the third season of One Punch Man, but there is a good reason for that. It isn’t just to give the animation staff the chance to recover from what was a pretty underwhelming second season – it is also to give us all a chance to come to terms with the absolutely wild things the manga threw at us during the Monster Association Arc.

We’re going to be discussing some spoilers for the manga of One Punch Man for this week’s Popverse Jump. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the Monster Association Arc that is going to make up most of One Punch Man season three.

The first thing to mention about this arc is that it is loooooooong. It isn't just the longest arc of the manga; it was over half the manga’s run by the time it finished back in 2022. Some of this arc was adapted in season two of the anime, but that still leaves a lot of content to squeeze into what is likely to be a single cour / 13 episode season. Even if a lot of it can be skipped (Saitama spends most of the arc just… wandering around underground), it is still going to be a wild trip.

One Punch Man’s biggest weakness has always been its main character’s ability to win any fight with minimal effort, so Saitama spends most of the Monster Association Arc out of commission. This leaves the other characters to try to fight off the combined might of every monster without their most powerful heroes. The result could have been boring – an exercise in simply dragging the plot out until Saitama shows up to fix the problem. Instead, we get to really focus on the whole cast of One Punch Man and it leads to some incredible moments.

Darkshine (or Blackluster, depending on the translation you read) learns that, despite his strength and endurance, he is a coward at heart. Tatsumaki gets to show us just how terrible her psychic tornado can be by soloing the final boss. Blaze, the almost mythical top-ranked member of the Hero Association, finally makes an appearance and reveals he’s been fighting God like it is a perfectly normal thing to do. All of this around some of the most spectacular page layouts and imagery in any action manga in recent years.

However, when he does finally get to punch stuff, Saitama faces off against Garou, the Hero Killer who has gone all weird and monstrous himself. Their fight threatens to destroy Earth, so they get teleported to one of Jupiter’s moons so they can punch each other in peace. It is an epic fight that ends up splitting the timeline in two after – and I promise I’m not making this up – a fart so powerful it propels Saitama through space at near-lightspeed.

Unlike the upcoming shock that Spy x Family fans are going to get when the third season comes out this year, all of this is par for the course in One Punch Man. It is a gag manga that occasionally takes itself seriously, after all. The difficulty is going to be fitting it all in. There is so much for the One Punch Man anime to tackle in season three and most of it is peak weird in the best way. There is epic action mixed in with some surprisingly touching character moments and worldbuilding bombshells that still haven’t been completely resolved in the two years since the arc ended.

If the One Punch Man anime can do it all well, it could deliver one of the most memorable seasons of animation we’ve had in years. I am approaching season three with a kind of cautious optimism, knowing that even if the pacing of the anime isn’t quite right at least it will look really, really cool along the way.

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