Piggy Bancon

Piggy Bancon (豚の貯金バコン Buta No Chokin Bakon) is a Mysterious Being that appears in the OPM Extra chapter 200 Yen. He is less a danger than a public nuisance, menacing the populace of Z-City for coins and fleeing from police.

Appearance
Piggy Bancon resembles a gigantic, grinning piggy bank (replete with coin slot) with a ribbon around his neck and naked, hairy limbs protruding from cracked holes on his torso. Although he is capable of standing on his hind legs, he appears to achieve top speed by running on all fours.

Personality
Despite his disturbing appearance, Piggy Bancon seems solely obsessed with having coins inserted into himself, either by forcing his victims to do so, or tackling them to knock loose any spare change. Once satisfied, he flees immediately, and is more concerned with evading pursuit than inflicting violence.

History


Piggy Bancon appears in Z-City during the afternoon of a 12-year-old Saitama's second day in middle school, whereupon he injures several police officers and flees; video footage of his escape is broadcast on television, marking the first appearance of a Mysterious Being in ten months.

The next day, Saitama is beaten and extorted by bullies for a paltry 200 yen, who are in turn ambushed by Piggy Bancon and forced to insert the money into him. Frustrated at his own inadequacy, Saitama recklessly pursues the monster, only to be rammed and knocked unconscious.

Shortly after, Piggy Bancon is surrounded and easily defeated by police and military forces, although Saitama never recovers his stolen money.

Abilities & Powers
To normal humans, Piggy Bancon is a terrifying creature, but hardly remarkable compared to other Mysterious Beings in the series.

Physical Abilities
Enhanced Speed: Given his propensity for flight, Piggy Bancon can use his superior speed to escape pursuit or ram into victims with considerable force—enough to outrun most humans, or perforate a solid wall.

Trivia

 * The name of the latest monster of the week: 怪人・豚の貯金バコン/Kaijin: Buta no Chokin-Bakon. So, the typical Japanese word for a piggy bank is 豚の貯金箱/buta no chokin-bako.  This breaks down to 豚/buta=pig, 貯金/chokin=saving money, and 箱/bako=box.  The wordplay here is that by sticking on ‘n’ onto the end of bako, it’s morphed into bakon, which sounds kind of like a generic Godzilla/Ultraman Tokusatsu monster name, which have a tendency to just take the name of whatever the monster is based on and stick random extra bits on (and, in the Japanese writing system, using katakana instead of kanji to write the name).  See for instance Mothra, and (from earlier in OPM) Slugrus and Kamakyuri.  As it happens, Bakon looks like it ought to be a play on bacon, what with the pig connection and all, but I’m fairly sure this is just a coincidence: in Japanese, the English word bacon is actually written as ベーコン/bēkon.  Meanwhile, バコン/Bakon happens to be how the Japanese write the name of the Cambodian temple of Bakong.  One learns the darndest things researching monster names…

Oh yeah, the 怪人/kaijin bit at the beginning is just describing the creature as a monster, and isn’t part of the name proper (that’s why it’s separated from the actual name with the ・ mark, equivalent to : in English). So overall, this name could be adapted into English as something like “monster: Piggy Bankon”. Which still ends up sounding like a joke on “bacon”. In Viz it’s simply “monster: Piggy Bank”.