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Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou was licensed by Seven Seas. The world may be a rapidly worsening, irredeemable shithole but man a lot of good comics are coming out these days
 

Felicia

Power is fleeting, love is eternal
(She/Her)
I just discovered that all six chapters of the original "Strider Hiryu" manga, the one that was part of the weird multimedia project that included the arcade and NES games, are now fan-translated into english. For a long time, only the first three chapters had been translated (viewable here on the good old "Light Sword Cypher Mainframe" homepage), but I found a forum post linking to a Discord server where translations of the last three chapters can be found and downloaded. The only part that's not translated now is the prequel "Strider Hiryu Gaiden" chapter, but there might be some discussion on doing that on that same Discord server.

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I haven't sat down and read the manga through yet, but I'm always happy when a fascinating bit of video game culture is made available to a wider audience. Supposedly the plot of the NES game hews more closely to the manga than the arcade game.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
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I've mentioned it before, in its scanlation days, but Asaya Miyanaga's Nicola Traveling Around the Demons' World wrapped up publication last year, both domestically and in licensed and localized form, courtesy of Seven Seas. The four volumes and two dozen-ish chapters that comprise the full run are some of the best comics ever crafted, in the way that their existence delights while the hunger for more gnaws away at the senses when it's over. It's a good-hearted beyond belief travelogue of human ragamuffin Nicola and the devil salesman Simon, in their journeys through a world of demons for no particular goal at all other than the joy of travel and meeting new people. Valued media calls to mind its ilk, and in here I would (as I'm prone to) draw a parallel to Dorohedoro, because aesthetically and thematically the works share much between them: Miyanaga's art is in a word, painstaking, in a way that echoes Hayashida's mania of detailing her dimension of demons and devils, with a penciling and shading style that forgoes solid blocks of screen tone and clean, articulated lines and leans in favour of scribbled and hyperemotive texture--almost Janssonian in its effect on the atmosphere it can convey. It is a not only a character-minded illustrative focus but one concerned with their surroundings and world that carry each scene, and Miyanaga use of two-page spreads is one of the most arresting and emotionally resonant in the medium.

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The second point of comparative thought between the two is that as stories they wield the macabre and unusual as an anchor to root their explorations of heartfelt character dynamics with; in Dorohedoro Hayashida accomplishes this with the almost comically extreme explosions of violence contrasting the odd couple and squabbling family unit sitcom stylings, whereas with Nicola nothing so explicitly grim or gruesome is focused on, but Nicola's explorations of a world she does not fully know or understand act as a similar vehicle for the protagonist and her compatriots' hearts to shine when they're met with the ghoulish and superficially upsetting, and despite the subject matter being so literally devilish the most important aspect is always how imaginative any given situation that manifests is, to both authors' lasting credit. There's even a similar narrative trajectory between the two series where the earlier, establishing self-contained chapters gradually give way to a mounting serial narrative momentum of increasing urgency, without shedding the by-then in full bloom character relationships and motivations that are able to carry the parts of the story lighter on said development. And even then, for its modest scale, Nicola never falters, spins its wheels, or repeats a proven narrative beat. Everything it does in its brief run is singular and unique and essentially as perfect as any comic could ask to be.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Right now I'm reading A Clockwork Apple, an anthology of Osamu Tezuka's more mature short stories, most of them crime or science fiction. They are a lot of fun, though the title tale is a little lacking. The other ones are great punchy little tales that feel sort of like Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents and make the collection completely worthwhile.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
Sometimes, I have the urge to revisit Dragon Ball, in some form or another. After learning, that Dragon Ball Super, while stopping as an Anime (at least I think it did) a while ago, the manga is still going. So I read that. It goes through all the arcs of the Anime (except for Golden Frieza, that is just mentioned in one or two panels), but is way shorter und concise. A bit of a shame - while I understand that the multi-universe tournament was really bloated, I liked how some of the really old, original DB characters like Muten Roshi and Tenshinhan got a chance to shine, at least for a bit. Still glad, that power levels have basically been thrown out of the window, giving these folks a chance to fight again. I mean, power creep is still a thing, it is still happening that one character comes, seems like he will save the day, and then the other character will get way stronger. And there, the power levels apply again, and everyone else is useless.

Anyway, unlike the anime, in the manga it seems like the whole tournament really only takes around 42 minutes, or whatever it was. It also reduces the boring, last fight to an enjoyable, short amount.

I did enjoy the following arc with Moro (even though he only lost, because he didn't use his special ability at the end - at least, I don't understand why he didn't), and like how Goku and Vegeta are finally start to develop in different ways. Still, a really bad case of "oh no, you are so much stronger than me - except no, I didn't use my real power, which makes me completely superior to you". Whatever, at least Yamcha had a moment, where he could beat someone.

The next, still ongoing arc doesn't really interest me. Too much time with new people I couldn't care less about. Also, too much focus on Gokus parents. I don't care too much about world building here, but Saiyans are supposed to be this stupidly aggressive race, where even a baby is a monster that might kill everyone on a planet. So, who is the exception? Gokus father, of course. Because our hero has got to have that really special person, the only good Saiyan, as a father, because being a good person is heredatory, I guess. Really don't like this. Also, there is so much about this guy, who thinks all Saiyans are evil, but no, Gokus father only seemed that way, but then he saved him.

I had to role my eyes a bit, when Shenlong actually could just fulfill the wish to make someone the strongest person in the universe, even if you offer something for it. Just seems really weird, the dragons powers are clearly restricted. But whatever, this is just a minor quibble, DBs worldbuilding isn't consistent, so whatever.
 
Vinland Saga feels like it's at the endgame. Recently, Hild forgave Thorfinn and it was one of the more moving moments I've seen in a comic in a while.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
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Putting out the strongest possible recommendation I can for Frieren: Beyond Journey's End by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, licensed and published by Viz since late last year. It's about the titular elven mage Frieren who journeyed with an adventuring party of four for a decade, culminating in the defeat of the Demon King, and now it's seventy-something years later. That's the setup for the actual narrative, which involves the millenia-old protagonist's delayed processing of grief and loss over her former comrades from simply aging and her reconciling with the fact that as functionally immortal she has never been good at relating to individuals with mortal lifespans, and becoming newly resolved to taking what she can from her memories of her friends and applying those morals and principles to her new life, travels and relationships. I was initially worried that the series might mine the manufactured sentimentality overmuch in an exploitative way, but it quickly stabilizes into more of a quiet backbone to the mundane travelogues that the bulk of the storytelling exists in, bringing out the parallel narrative flashbacks when needed as fond remembrances and not as manipulative baiting of the tearducts. It's a tone that benefits the whole massively as it's capable of adopting sweetness, tension and humour as needed without feeling like each can only occupy one compartmentalized space at a time; if anything, a sense of deadpan no-selling is inherent to all of the comic's language, both visually and textually. There aren't any flailing overreactions, no forced screaming to stress punchlines, no overemotive caricaturish face-pulling--instead everyone's kind of tired-looking with heavy eyelieds, slouching along arms dangling, a soft smile on their faces as the height of outward expression, making the bits of humour all the better for how understatedly delivered they are when they occur.

It's kind of a chameleon of a series in other ways too because while its base state is Frieren and company simply existing in their world and taking on odd jobs to fund further travels, it can segue just as aptly to do an arc devoted to magical conflict and the rules therein like any good battle-focused series might, or even a formalized team exam arc with similar genre roots and conventions. These stretches don't take away from the core appeal of the series because they're always interested in further developing the cast's relations or the quietly vibrant worldbuilding powering investment in spending so much time in it, while the increased interpersonal moments with allies and foes highlight other strengths of the tone, like the ability to depict consequential and grave violence without wallowing in the act at all for its own sake, and how the series is also functionally completely free of exploitative sexualization of its cast both in art and in the way people are written, with only the mildest and most infrequent examples of objectionable moments to be found throughout, and even those would have to be drawn from a stone. It's gorgeously drawn with an emphasis on nature and the environment, full of terrific implementations of fantasy narrative staples, and acts as practically a celebration of the very concept of an RPG party on a deeply personal level from the perspective of one of its participants and depicting the life they would lead in the aftermath. Absolutely stellar in every way.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I mostly write and talk about media I like because on a base level it's a more fulfilling and interesting avenue of discourse and a critical skillset I want to cultivate rather than the opposite, but it's not like either exists in isolation; counterpoints and contrast are always welcome if not necessary to capture whatever it is you like about a given work, through the context of something you don't. That's part of the reason that I sometimes end up reading material that I think I have pegged at a glance from the outset--not for any expectation that it will subvert those presumptions but because a flawed work or a plain bad one can add to the understanding and appreciation of another through its own foibles. It's where I stand with something like My Dress-Up Darling, an ostensibly craft-oriented series focusing on the joys of cosplay, but which from moment one and never significantly straying from first impressions devotes its entirety to sexualizing and offering half-naked fifteen-year-olds on a platter for the reader's exacting consumption. An author who has the visual storytelling tools for committing a story of adolescent serial blushing on the page and has a subject matter apt for conveying that border between embarrassment and jubilation manages to waste their entire premise on the uncritical exploitation inherent in its presentation, which is of course not accidental because it's the selling point. I did not read it because I expected to be won over--just to confirm suspicions about what it seemed to be from the outset and ultimately was.

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Following up such drek with better work would elevate it by contrast no matter what, but Skip and Loafer is not in need of any external aids. Misaki Takamatsu's slice of life series, licensed by Seven Seas since last year, walks its own path in ways that leave premise-sharing peers scrambling to catch up to it if they cannot measure up to its style and substance. Like the counterpoint series above, it's also about high-school freshmen, also features a budding romance between its principal duo, and also stars teens who struggle to belong, as teens always will. The most basic of generalities are where the similarities end, because Takamatsu cannot and will not subject her cast to an exploitative and sexualized eye under any circumstance; it's not an inclination or reached-for goal that exists in her visual language or her writing emphasis. More than the refusal to exploit, her art and designs draw the focus toward the difference in physical forms and facial features in a stylized but realistic way that is a constant joy to witness unfold whether through the expressive comedy beats or the somber heart-to-hearts. I have not been this enamored by fabric and fashion in a modern-day fictional context since Sailor Moon in how her characters present themselves and how clothes are utilized to aid and impress storytelling further.

It's important that these points of individualization and distinction exist because Skip and Loafer's narrative strength as a school life series does not fall solely on the shoulders of the titular pair of Mitsuki and Sousuke--whose relationship while involving attraction always foremost emphasizes their great friendship--but the entire supporting cast of the piece that leaves it feeling much more like an involved ensemble than an eternal will-they-won't-they routine with an audience in tow. Every single character of recurring note has time devoted to them, to explorations of their interiority and motivations, to portraying considerable nuance in their psychological depth, because such an emphasis is necessary for a story like this that does not focus so much on manufactured social antagonism but the complexities of internally-driven and defined worries and anxieties and how they gel or clash. The characters know it too because the familiar to the genre silent stewing and simmering over misunderstandings or misinterpreted communication are often cut short by the subjects themselves, putting a stop to prolonged grievances before they have time to root and take control of the narrative. It's still a story of teenagers acting out the lived experience of that age set, but the guiding hand of Takamatsu as storyteller gently pushes people toward open communication and forgoing hollow bad-faith assumption whenever possible.

Mitsuki embodies the work's ethos the best as its most central figure, as another feather in the cap that any fictional work would be glad to enjoy in the protagonist being as compelling as their stature posits. In this case, Mitsuki comes by it through a sort of guileless confidence, equals parts a self-satisfied smuglord and buffoon and an insightful introspective with emotional intelligence to share and carry the social cues she lacks. The inquisitive goodhearted bearing she exudes is most iconically summarized in the : > smile she often wears, which is just as likely to morph into an over-the-top grimace as required, with both being uniquely her to the core. She is a character who is just plain fun to watch go about her daily life because there is a magnetism to that kind of forthright explosion of emotion. It's never a question of reducing Mitsuki into a book nerd or gendering her emotional intelligence, as all the qualities that make up who she is are allowed to craft a multifaceted persona, which rings true for all the other characters too--you simply won't find ready-made archetypes fulfilling quotas in this story, as everyone is granted depth, empathy and opportunity to interact with one another to create impressions of individual instead of caricature.

I understand if the romcom high school premise wears thin for some folks--it's a crowded genre and has been for decades upon decades. The very things that make it easy to roll eyes at also make it a comfort food of habit and reliable sustenance, formed from its conventions and cliches. Skip and Loafer is many things, and it may recall some better examples of the genre--Kimi ni Todoke, My Love Story!! and such--but I can't really put it any other way: it's the best teenagers-and-their-feelings book I've ever read in the medium. I was in love with it from the first page and it deserves no lesser evaluation for everything it is and does.
 
Climax of Golden Kamuy was this week. Next chapter should be the last. Man, what a fucking awesome penultimate chapter. So many clever yet subtle callbacks, and such a striking emotional moment. Gonna miss this one when it's done.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Oh dang, nice. I watched the whole anime adaptation but have never read the original.
 

Rosewood

The metal babble flees!
(she/her)
I've now read the first volumes of Skip and Loafer and Frieren. Thanks for the recommendations, Peklo. They are both excellent, and, well, quite different from each other.

In S&L I like how Mitsumi starts off her time in Tokyo with "in ten years I'll be a Todai graduate and high-ranking government minister," and almost immediately finds out that her ambitions won't be so easily realized as she thought. I also like how the group of friends is coming together, with its tentativeness and tensions.

I have an aversion to the prototypical Japanese fantasy setting, but Frieren has enough else going to almost make me able to overlook it. I've never seen a manga that deals with the passage of time in such a vivid way. The couple of scenes early on where Frieren cries made me worry a bit that she'd be doing that once a chapter, but those scenes were more to establish the motivation for her new journey, than an ongoing motif.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Heck yes. Glad you're checking out and enjoying them! I'll definitely be keeping up with both series as they continue.

I hadn't realized that Q Hayashida's post-Dorohedoro series Dai Dark has been licensed since last year, so that's another one that goes on the pile.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
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This was a birthday present to myself (which was yesterday, when these volumes arrived). I have to say that I am immediately in love with these books as physical objects because they're part of the Viz Signature line like my dearly cherished Dorohedoro, which is about my ideal for softcover manga editions. The page dimensions are a little larger than standard paperbacks, but not unwieldily so, and the cover bindings protrude just a bit past the pages themselves so they're firmer to hold and store. With Dorohedoro, the cover material was shiny and glossy so Hayashida's cacophonous and arresting collages really popped, whereas here the texture is coarser, weathered and worn to the touch, reflecting the type of story and tone found within. I have not read Maison Ikkoku since I was a teenager but already this feels like the best possible way to reacquaint with it. There are three volumes left to finish the run, to be released over the rest of the year--I'll absolutely be there.
 

Rosewood

The metal babble flees!
(she/her)
I had this ten-book version of MI in the Japanese edition. VIZ did an excellent job replicating the look and feel of it. Between that and the (mostly) improved translation, I don't feel the need to keep the originals anymore.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Yeah this is another one where I have the whole original now-massively-outclassed edition. Sadly I don’t know if I’m still in love enough with MI to pay for it all over again. But it does look gorgeous.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I'm finding it far better than any recollection of mine would've suggested, and I already considered it Takahashi's best work.
 

Balrog

(He/Him)
Does anyone else use the Libby app through their library to get digital manga? Any recommendations?
 

Rosewood

The metal babble flees!
(she/her)
I'm finding it far better than any recollection of mine would've suggested, and I already considered it Takahashi's best work.
I agree with this. Also, as I thought about it I realized that aside from MI I haven't been all that impressed with much that she's written that wasn't shonen. Well, Mermaid Forest is good, but it's still nowhere close in my estimation.

As for MI itself, I've been through the story at least five or six times in manga and anime form, so it's a comfort read/watch more than anything else.
 
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Does anyone else use the Libby app through their library to get digital manga? Any recommendations?

I've used this for American comics before and it definitely works, but I'm not sure I can recommend anything specific to Libby. The way Libby/OverDrive works is that individual libraries buy digital copies of titles that they think their patrons will like, the same way they'd buy physical books to put on their shelves. (Technically, I think they buy the right to lend certain works out X times, and then they lose their rights to it after a certain number of digital loans...) So, what's available to you in Libby/Overdrive will not be what's available to me, unless we're patrons of the same library/libraries. (This is also true for the Kanopy video service. I have Kanopy access through a few institutions, and some have much better selections than others.)

If you're just looking for general manga recommendations... what do you like and/or do you see anything at your library you're thinking about giving a shot and want some feedback about?
 

Balrog

(He/Him)
If you're just looking for general manga recommendations... what do you like and/or do you see anything at your library you're thinking about giving a shot and want some feedback about?

I didn't realize it worked that way, I thought whatever was available to me was available to everyone lol. I'll dig through here for recs. Thanks
 

Sarcasmorator

Same as I ever was
(He/him)
If I can take a moment to shill for my own company, you can get an absolute ton of manga through the Shonen Jump manga app. Lots free, $2/mo for all of it.
 
The One Punch Man manga (the Yusuke Murata remake) is doing some weird stuff that's diverging from the original webcomic significantly. And not just in the regular way. Murata wrote an end to the Saitama/Garou fight. But then he went back, and rewrote the chapter to have the fight escalate to a preposterous level including being possessed by God, with cosmic gamma-ray burst punches, and Blast showing up to fight, and Genos seemingly killed. I wonder if Murata is trying to end the comic.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
So I read OUTLANDERS by Johji Manabe in a fit of 80s Space opera manga Pique.

It's the best at being exactly what it wants to be, which is a manga About some dork ass loser having a hot alien babe fall out of the sky and decide she's in love with him, which somehow escelates into a full on space opera.

I wonder what else Manabe Made OH HELLO THERE TRIPLE XXX SERIES ABOUT A DUDE BANGING WRESTLER MILFS.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
I hated every single miserable page of Chainsaw Man. Just absolutely loathed it. This isn't going to be some even-handed examination of a work but a cathartic opportunity to vent out frustrations and malcontent, so let's get to it.

This is cliché for me at this point, but you really can't consider Chainsaw Man without Dorohedoro. Tatsuki Fujimoto may be many things, but he's not shy about the influences that carry his works; the intense cinephile focus in everything he does is the foremost signifier of his interests and inspirations that feed into his creativity. Within his own medium, he's also been candid about what he likes and patterns things after, with Dorohedoro being among the works he's mentioned as a model for Chainsaw Man; he states it plainly or makes jokes about his comic being a deliberate knockoff. The adaptations have followed suit, with the anime being worked on by the same studio between the two series, utilizing the same 3D animation aesthetic, the same multiple ending sequences schema, and the same attitude of adapting a part of the story and maybe getting to the rest later. The signaling has been clear from every angle: the creative direction between the two series is inextricably connected and synonymous for the purposes of audience interest in all that they share. Should you like one, check out the other.

Dorohedoro is probably my favourite comic if it really came down to pinpointing a single work, and it's that affection and esteem that makes engaging with Chainsaw Man so uniquely exhausting. What could Fujimoto do but "jokingly" frame his comic as a knockoff in public statements? It's effectively an attempt to deflect from criticism, because the connections and parallels drawn are inevitable for all who are familiar with both works. "Taken on its own terms" for media that is so beholden to a model and from which it lifts concepts, iconography, plotting, structure, aesthetics, thematics, tone and everything else is not a tenable or possible position to adopt, when all of those elements that previously cohered or meant something have been twisted, diluted and misinterpreted into something superficially evocative but ultimately hollow and meaningless. The emotional reaction--and rejection--is what's to be depended on here, so the running commentary for those kneejerk interpretations is what will suffice to convey how little I think of this series and all that it represents. It's no more and no less a diatribe the likes of which it deserves in lieu of a charitable, good-faith analysis.

get ready for the dreaded discourse because post-watamote blues (which i don't love but it took a while for a 10+ year run) has lead me to read chainsaw man instead of complaining in its general direction. now i can moan informedly

seems like intensely macho bullshit at first blush, presented in a way that easily hooks an audience if you're at all attuned to that voice
and just highlights the unmistakable dorohedoro influence, which i fell for because it was none of that
kind of diametrically opposed art style too: hayashida's a scribbler at heart, and fujimoto forgoes detail if it's not dramatically conducive to include. otherwise it's a lot of clean, negative space paneling

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kneejerk reaction to power is like a mathematical synthesis to make both nikaido and noi less interesting at once

--

honestly it's dizzying how in such few chapters it's serving up these endless, unexamined masculine signifiers in the plotting. protagonist desperate for human connection; obviously the only way to express that is through him wanting to touch boob and making constant reference to it--he just like me. denji and his initial partner's squaring off through beating each other up, arguing about a woman in their lives and making tentative rapport through that, just like men do. clear contrast with how denji is a dog person and power is a cat person and how gendered even something as benign as that is played, like it's one piece or something with its aggressive gender essentialism. it's just this constant drive to hammer this stuff in and i don't even know if it's conscious or something fujimoto just thinks makes for a compelling narrative on some fundamental level

as a kid (for being like two years my junior i get to take that position) most assuredly raised by many comics that are as bad about this stuff as his own creations, it's not really a surprise that he's propagating a lot of the same shit they've done for decades

because it's clearly working toward some kinda "he just wants to connect........." uplifting "message" there are probably yt vids that are like "Chainsaw Man: A Celebration of Life"

--

it is pretty hateful on larger and smaller scale

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like this is the first character moment this person has
ha ha sex work as "comical" threat!!
she's the always nervous one. that's her Woman Trait, because they're all designed to serve up their distinct kink niches for varying preference

even the absurdities of the setting and concepts don't land as humorous because it's all so distastefully conceived. a gun devil born in america killed over a million ppl across the world in five minutes and resulted in worldwide stricter gun legislation and increased fear of guns and powered up all the devils as trickle-down effect. it's not cute or quirky--nothing like any devil character or scene in doro for instance. it's just inept farce-tinted would-be drama, and these conceptual flubs are just going to escalate as they need higher stakes and bosses to fight

--

two characters who are senior violence killers in their org, wear business casual attire on the job where they work as partners when not training up juniors, have a mostly platonic buds relationship but one harbors a crush on the oblivious other. guess fujimoto got confused drafting up aki and himeno and thought he was still reading about shin and noi in dorohedoro
i am not looking for these parallels. they're just there, screaming at you from the page
ofc it's all gendered more conventionally/boringly/worse when the analogues do occur
this entire thing feels like money-laundering operation where the medium isn't bogus bills but hangout gore comics

--

these supposed character beats for denji are like dude-coded stock filler. he yells about his "dream" when pushed to a corner. he keeps fighting even though he knows he'll surely die. he reluctantly sets out to repay a perceived debt to a dude who stood up for him because he can't bear to "owe one" to another guy. he's as surgically precisely boring as i always wanted to be as the lead of a comic
wow his chainsaws run on blood. get smaller and retract when running low on it. dick joke? goichi suda-endorsed???

denji gets a specific age (16) and fujimoto very consciously has the adult women in the cast tempt him with sex, make out with him, etc. etc. this just gets read as "god i wish that were me" wish-fulfillment from people who would probably decry something that had a teenage girl lead surrounded by adult dudes who aggressively flirted and suggested drunken sex with her
they have a literal denji on a leash shot in the anime op. it's not subtle

--

i think a lot of it is vague concepts of "accessibility". it's on the most popular official manga app by the biggest publisher so it's just there to try. it's "just" 10-ish volumes, under 100 chapters in the form that it concluded in before recently continuing again so it's relatively digestible. people talk about it as a "ride" so it's just this binge-read artifact that's easy to rec to people. and judging from how it's coming off, it is just intensely diluted from its inspirations in ways that pander to a wider base in a cynical way
and because people haven't necessarily been exposed to those inspirations in the first place, they can come off as fresh or somehow subversive to people whose context is a battle series like the mags this kinda stuff is published in and promoted in context of

also the huge personality cult around fujimoto built around key characteristics around his work ("he loves movies") that just gets more intense over time. long serializations and oneshots alike are hailed as auteur works of genius
manga mag self-hype is nothing to take any conclusions from but chainsaw man in its first chapter was propping him up as the "genius behind fire punch". fucking fire punch

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baddie getting shredded by a devil ability that involves an elongated skull motif. it's called curse. just curse. yes it's doro again
this comic makes me feel like i'm reading the collected works of nick simmons

--

awesome, fujimoto killed the vague noi analogue to make the shin analogue sad, immediately after she drunkenly tempted and brought denji to bed with her. her narrative role's over!!
the more this kinda stuff happens though the less those flippant comparisons to doro characters apply because that shit would never fly there, so i guess it's a silver lining
it's not exact, just the interdynamic i was describing earlier. power is in another way the noi analogue (foremost thirst object) in how at least the fanbase relates to her, so she's still around
so many best girls to choose from and pit against each other......... until some of them die
it just follows that we can't arrive at the sadness of a billion men until proportionally at least millions of women die to achieve it

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denji has a recurring dream of an ominous figure behind a door at the end of a cluttered apartment passage. fuckin' dying here [note: it's another dorohedoro motif lift]

bomb devil design is a bomb head on a sexy lady body wearing only an apron/evening gown kinda cloth that leaves her ass entirely exposed. once again, like when nikaido was going full devil, but which was played for comedy instead of titillation

--

[another person] thinking this morning "maybe what dorohedoro needed to become ultra popular was for its main protag to be a pathetic 'just like me' 'relatable' loser"

i've talked about in context of other writeups in the past how mystery-based narratives don't really do a lot for me. so detective fiction as a whole, really
doro starts out with "who is caiman", "why does caiman have a lizard-head", "who's the man in caiman's mouth" and they're all big, driving mysteries as introduced
but the answers to each come out to such convolution or past the points the characters really care about them that it just kind of organically devalues the revelations before they even happen
so i guess that's another sort of ideal for me, that they can be good hooks, but the answers don't really matter

another aspect for why that works is that caiman's whole identity crisis gradually stops mattering to him as much as it hasn't necessarily felt life-or-death for the reader because caiman is just a decent guy; if he has a goal you probably root for him but reaching that or untangling his past doesn't feel like it must occur for the dude to be happy. i think that's part of why the beginning volumes that mostly comprise more isolated one-shots of caiman and nikaido's day-to-day are especially cherished because they both seem content in the routine and life they have for themselves
and when Bullshit starts to pile up and they can no longer have that idyllic existence, the goal just becomes the desire to return to that status quo

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i'm not posting them because fuck but it's had two full-colour chapter opening page spreads that have been about nothing but subjecting women to the gaze
the first one laid out both of denji's at the time most prominent love interests on display in their underwear. hey it's the denji gaze so it's narratively justified come on man chill out high five

the chapter it preceded immediately transitioned into a horror segment where one of them was stalked by a serial killer who was going to murder and skin her, but the "twist" was that she was not in any danger because she was secretly the bomb devil. wow sex and violence flipped on its head!!
the later one depicts a recently introduced devil hunter assassin who's a chinese lady who keeps a harem of lesbian devilgirls around her. literally introduced in the aftermath of group sex, and that chapter opener is dedicated to illustrating her scissoring in the act with her gfs. grab for your queer representation, folks

[another person] look forward to her dying like a chapter later

i think she already did, though you can never be definitively be sure because the arbitrary way devil stuff works in this gives an out for reversing any potential stakes the hyperviolence could threaten to establish. so oops
make a comic about nothing but splatter dismemberment and also make me not care about any of it
i've seen a couple of people talk up fujimoto specifically because of his portrayal of women, and the only way it can even slightly make sense in my head is that people just like women to wear business casual suits and ties and violently murder other people with a degree of "competence" until they themselves are killed. i guess that is an appeal to someone

it's like the comic equivalent of wwe circa 2015 trying to co-opt and brand themselves a "women's revolution" just because the workers got to put their shit in marginally more than they had been allowed in decades

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like the only interpersonal beat in this more than halfway through that's worked even a little is denji and power pooling their individual braincells for half as much total grey matter, and even that had to be arrived at through the "oh this person isn't a person but an extension and target for my libido" song and dance and literal breast-fondling standing in for character development. i don't like power's portrayal on her own or in tandem with other characters much because it's still so much about making her a diminutive and cute womanchild pet

maybe her name's ironic for the irony poison generation

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dudes in their devil forms = fully clothed. women in their devil forms = fully nude. says a lot about society if u think about it

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is this really doing some hokey gun control metaphor via a literal Gun Devil

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i hadn't really forgotten the scene this was part of but i wish i had. chainsaw man should eat me so i won't have to think about his shitty comic

how is a chainsaw devil able to kill and eat all the devils in hell when this thing figures they're stronger the more feared their respective concept is by humans. chainsaws are logging equipment. carpentry stuff. fujimoto watches too much horror shit

even the climax of this emulates the set-up and pay-per-view spectacle for chidaruma's birthday blowout in doro. just a lot more boring

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"After being killed by Denji, she is reborn as a young girl called Nayuta and placed in his care to be raised as a better person."

this is how the series resolves its most prominent woman and primary antagonist
have a depowered, diminished thing as a reward
powerful women can be redeemed if they're subject to male guidance, even if that caretaker is literally 16

power also dies (twice) for denji's sake and they set it up so denji has to uphold a contract with her to find her and make friends with her again after she resurrects in hell or whatever. so you have a sequel motivation of Go After Woman etc.

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very important to make one of the ppl in the santa claus hivemind a pedophile too
get it because he's santa claus and he preys on children. wow gott'em

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my whole thing with the series is that despite the doro influence it flips the balance of narrative completely where the action sequences and violence take center stage/page count and the hangout release valve character stuff are the intermissions--doro is the opposite. so when fujimoto tries to go for an emotive beat it falls flat because there's nothing to root that expression in since he just wants to focus on the monster mash
the cast are such interchangeable, anonymous fodder, which makes them easy to kill to showcase some new devil power or whatever. also easy for me to not give a fuck

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i will not spoiler this because i hate it: there's also the bit where the President of the United States sacrifices a year off the lifespan of All American Citizens to summon the Gun Devil to kill makima. very deep and subtle theming

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the entire series comes down to answering the question of "why can't chainsaw man be defeated" with "because he's chainsaw man" and trying to wrest some thematic satisfaction out of that "subversive" inevitability for the role he was granted by the author's hand

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i don't even think it's good horror. it's way too preoccupied with the battle spectacle aspect of the presentation to unnerve or unsettle. like it does the whole samurai media cliche of two dudes rushing past each other, taking a swing, standing in place while mumbling some post-battle lines, and then one of them gets split in half or whatever--usually the one you "didn't expect to". shit like that is all over it, like the recurring jack-off chapter ending page spreads where chainsaw man does a cool pose while splattering whatever the hell he's fighting this week. it's so simultaneously anodyne and awed by its own choreography to ever land on anything actually squeamish. the entire emotive range it has consists of the word "hype"

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how do you even begin to unpack the plot points it specifically brings up about how the Nazi Devil and World War II devil have been eaten by chainsaw man in hell so now the concepts they represent have been erased from collective consciousness. like congrats you managed to achieve total holocaust denial within your fiction to... some end???? some worldbuilding flavour? i hear that's a popular thing to do

you don't drop shit like that as an incidental data point and then just go back to pretty people in leisure suits blowing up apartment housing

but i guess all bad taste is permissible or encouraged if the author makes endless gestures to exploitation and grindhouse media like his hollywood masters

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it's also really, really downplayed in the story but it's actually a period piece, taking place in an alternate 1997. it's just an excuse for fujimoto to engage his cinephile affection for retro media formats and aesthetics, to have crt tvs all over in the scenes he draws. otherwise it's just so irrelevant to anything the series does. like wow the soviet union is still around for some reason. the reason is to signal toward past real life iconography, once again, because a soviet agent just rings a little different than a modern russian agent would

At the other end of this, I just feel tired. Tired that crap like this is elevated to once-in-a-generation blockbuster status, tired that all its bad ideas track favourably for its audience, tired that it is so ubiquitous that one is compelled to engage with it and formulate a Take, and tired that it's pulled me into a spiral of dressing it down in mockery and cynicism. Railing against a legitimate industry phenomenon doesn't make one an incisive rebel just for the adopted contrarian stance, so I say this with all the genuine, sincere affect that I can: I haven't hated a comic this much in a long time, and I hope it doesn't happen again.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I never read chainsaw man, but given that this sounds like why I don't bother with much shounen in general, I probably will continue to stay that course.

Only thing of Fujimoto's I've read was the story that was basically to the 2019 KyoAni arson attack what Kimi no na Wa was for the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. It was fine I guess
 
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