I had fond memories of Fist of the North Star from teenage years. It's got a stoic hero who mostly lets his fists do the talking (in the 1980s anime version, he could talk without moving his chin too!), it's got this post-apocalyptic look reminiscent of Mad Max (lots of leather and chains, lots of spikes on the leather), and over the top campy dialogue. (The guy says: "You are already dead," so many times that we parodied that) The first 10 volumes of the series covers the original story arc, and if you read that and stop, the story resolves itself. It's clear that most of the series' writing was improvised, with the author saying that he expected to be able to take a break after the first series and was instead told to deliver more within a month!
To my surprise, the library has the entire collection, which I never read, so I checked it out one book at a time. This is really campy stuff, so you can't really binge the whole series at once because it gets really silly. What surprised me was that unlike modern comics where the origin story and the resolution of the initial impetus of the plot takes multiple volumes to deal with (I'm looking at Frieren, where the author and artist couldn't even be bothered to finish the story, despite having multiple years off), Fist of the North Star finishes its entire arc within the first volume. It's not even a bad finish, with surprising twists.
The art is incredibly dynamic, though sometimes quite silly. The premise is that Kenshiro is the inheritor of a secret assassination technique called "Hokuto Shinken". This technique allows him to hit various channeling points in the human body that causes insane effects. Heads explode, bodies come apart, and sometimes he can even achieve programmatic effect like causing you to die 3 minutes from when he hit you. Of course, his opponents also always have their own secret martial arts techniques, and just like in Pokemon (I'm pretty sure this series predated Pokemon), everyone has a penchant for yelling out their secret technique's name and even explaining it in combat. It's all very hokey. One example was when Kenshiro faces a sumo wrestler of some sort who has so much fat on his body that he couldn't get to the channeling points. Well, Kenshiro is no dummy, so he uses a rapid series of kicks to shift the fat away from a channeling point and when the channeling point is revealed he strikes it and wins the day.
The problem with having a hero/protagonist with such power is that the escalation gets crazy. Each opponent he faces has to have even more super powers or secret techniques, and by the 8th book you're pretty far along (turns out that there are multiple inheritors of the secret techniques, and then he gets to fight all of them).
That's probably not the worst thing. The worst thing is that it's a 1980s adolescent boys' comic. The women in the books are there for decoration or for rescuing. Even when they supposedly have martial arts abilities they are easily captured and then used as bait for Kenshiro to show up and look heroic. Much more recent comics probably do not have this problem.
Nevertheless, this is the kind of stuff where if you're exhausted after a long day it does not require much intellectual brainpower to process the comic, and the art is still dynamic and exciting after all these years.
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