Reject Book, Embrace Manga

I’ve been unable to read books for most of the summer due to migraines, so in search of the good kind of brain stimulation I decided to get back into reading manga. I used to be pretty into it during my teenage years and my early twenties, but for whatever reason I fell off pretty hard in recent years.

Thankfully, accessing manga is a lot easier and cheaper than it was back in the day—in fact, Viz’s Shonen Jump app offers a subscription that will get you more manga than you could probably ever read for less than three smackeroonies a month, which I think we can all agree isn’t a lot of smackeroonies even if you find yourself somewhat smackeroonie-deficient.

Here’s a review of the first three manga I picked.

Jujutsu Kaisen

Yuji Itadori is an average high school dude who’s somewhat less boring than most high school dudes due to his involvement in his school’s occult investigation club. Also he’s really, impossibly athletic for reasons that seem like they might be supernatural, but he doesn’t want to do anything with that skill. Then one day he ends up eating a cursed monster finger in order to save his fellow occult club friends, and a squad of magic-wielding edgelords appear to offer him the choice of either being immediately executed to destroy the curse he consumed, or enroll in edgelord magic school and track down and eat the rest of the cursed fingers and then get executed to destroy the infamous demon the fingers belong to. Yuji is a pretty nice guy and likes the idea of protecting people who might be killed by the curses, so he takes the second option.

Jujutsu Kaisen is, I gather, one of the big modern Shonen Jump success stories. After getting through twenty-three chapters, I’m kind of at a loss as to why.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad per se. This is one of those Jump properties like Death Note that gets a little darker than their normal fare, which means it ends up feeling kind of like a horror spin on your typical shonen action manga. I really like the grotesque monster designs and the fairly frequent inclusion of outright body horror.

The thing is, that body horror isn’t always intentional. Sometimes it happens because the art, frankly, kind of sucks.

Characters are frequently off-model, to the point that they become difficult to recognise in smaller panels (it doesn’t help that everyone wears near-identical black clothes). Manga author Gege Akutami makes frequent use of simplified chibi-style reaction shots–so frequent that I suspect at least some of them were used to cut down on drawing time rather than for comedy–and they look terrible, like something you’d see doodled in a teenager’s notebook. It’s the kind of thing that makes me suspect Akutami is one of those artists who has only ever learned to draw things in their particular manga style, and is therefore lacking in the fundamental drawing skills that underpin truly solid artwork.

I would probably have been able to look past this if it was just a matter of aesthetics–I’ve read webcomics with much worse art–but the sequential storytelling is also extremely sloppy. Characters that are speaking are frequently off-screen, so that little name tags are needed to identify them, and the flow between panels isn’t very clear a lot of the time. When combined with the manga’s tendency to jump back and forth in time a lot for no real reason, it all makes for a frustrating reading experience.

I do think there’s some good writing in here. The characters in particular are well-realised and grew on me quickly during my brief time reading the manga. But the execution of that writing in manga form is so slapdash that I just couldn’t continue with it.

Fabricant 100

I was still in the mood for some supernatural shonen hijinks after Jujutsu Kaisen, so I checked out a series that’s only been running in Jump for a relatively short time. It started out really impressing me, but went downhill pretty fast.

Set in a vaguely mid-20th century world that might be Europe or might not be, Fabricant 100 is about the titular fabricants, Frankenstein’s monster-esque creatures created by a sinister doctor who sought to create the “ideal human.” After being freed from their creator, the fabricants began killing people and stealing their body parts in an attempt to attain perfection, specifically targeting those with “superior flesh.” One such superior flesh-haver is Ashibi Yao, whose family are all born with near-superhuman longevity and healing. After his relatives were massacred by a group of fabricants, Ashibi made a bargain with the strongest fabricant in the world, No.100: if she helps him eliminate all the other fabricants in existence, he’ll voluntarily let her kill him and take his flesh for herself once he turns 18 (the fabricants are only interested in harvesting bodies that have matured into their full potential, which is why Ashibi was the only one spared in the massacre).

This starts out very promisingly as an adventure story with a dark twist. Achibi and No. 100 travel across the land, tracking down fabricants to dispatch and getting into zany situations due to 100’s over-protective behaviour towards Achibi. The set-up reminded me a bit of the early chapters of Fullmetal Alchemist, and I dared to hope that the story might move in a similarly expansive and creative direction. And it’s also incredibly gory by the standards of shonen manga—100 tears out another fabricant’s eyes in the opening chapter—which is a plus.

Alas, things quickly take a turn for the formulaic as out heroes encounter an organisation of fabricant hunters who all have special powers, including named special attacks. Before long we’re getting into drawn-out fights with super-powered enemies where the combatants yell their attack names, and my interest quickly waned after that.

It’s not that I dislike shonen battle manga, although it’s not my favourite sub-genre even in the shonen umbrella. I’m totally down for a long-running series full of incremental power-ups and tournament arcs. The problem is that Fabricant 100’s early chapters seem to promise something much more interesting, and in fact I have a feeling that the series’ author might have intended to carry on in that vein instead of going the battle manga route.

When Jump manga shift genre, it tends to happen pretty slowly. By contrast, Fabricant 100 switches from fantasy adventure to straightforward battle setup in a handful of chapters. One minute Achibi is a non-combatent who uses his intelligence to aid 100 instead of fighting directly, the next he’s using his own blood to activate BLOOD BLOCKING VEIL and nerf his enemies. It’s admittedly kind of bad ass, but it also feels like he’s suddenly turned into a different character.

The specific thing that made me stop reading is when No. 100 suddenly manifests pyromantic fire powers, brought on by conveniently unlocking memories that she had apparently been suppressing until now. Shonen characters getting flashy new skill-sets is nothing new, but it generally happens a long way into the manga’s run and not less than two dozen chapters in.

Given how abrupt these shifts are, and given how early into the series’ run they happened, I can’t help but wonder if they might have been responses to low engagement from readers. If that’s the case, I think the author might have secured longevity by sacrificing what made the story unique.

It’s a shame, because even after the tonal shift there’s a lot to like about Fabricant 100. It’s genuinely got a lot of psychological depth to its characters, whether that consists of Achibi trying to figure out what healing from grief means to him or explorations of the fabricants’ inhuman psychology and motivations.

Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War

That’s zero for two on battle manga, so I decided to switch genres to romantic comedy. Kaguya-Sama is an established (and finished) success that I’ve heard very good things about, and I’m happy to report that the hype wasn’t wrong.

Set at one of those elite anime academies with an elite student council, the manga is about council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice-president Kaguya Shinomiya, two teenage geniuses who everyone at school assumes are secretly a power couple. They’re not, but that isn’t because they’re not interested in each other; rather, it’s because they’re both in a pitched battle to force the other to confess their feelings first, because as everyone knows, the first person to confess their feelings in a relationship loses. Thus they’re both constantly engaging in elaborate mind games in order to come out victorious, and since they’re both super-geniuses those mind games tend to quickly spiral out of control.

So what you’ve got here is essentially a Death Note-style “I can’t let her know that I know that she’s figured out what I was thinking after she figured out what I was thinking” except with absurdly low stakes and for reasons that only exist in the two protagonist’s heads.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. Yes, most of the comedic action of the manga takes place because Kaguya and Miyuki have genius-level IQs but absolutely no emotional intelligence, but reading between the lines their reluctance to just have a conversation about their feelings does have some more solid grounding. Kaguya comes from a distinguished, wealthy family and obviously has some internalized hang-ups around dating someone from a humble background, while Miyuki seems to subconsciously think of confessing his feelings as a threat to his masculinity—his greatest fear is that Kaguya will call him cute, something he pictures with abject horror in almost every chapter.

The fun part about this is that both of them are operating under so many layers of self-deception and bizarre ideas about how relationships work that it’s not clear if they’re even consciously aware of these motivations. This means that their stated reason for doing whatever immature bullshit any particular chapter is about is usually complete nonsense.

As you may be able to gather, Kaguya-sama basically only has one joke (at least in the chapters I’ve read—apparently it switches things up later), but it’s a really funny joke and the manga manages to spin a seemingly-endless amount of comedic gold out of it by letting the mind games escalate to absurd levels.

And I haven’t even mentioned my favourite character: Chika Fujiwara, Kaguya’s childhood friend who is dumber than a box of rocks but also possesses a normal human insight into love and relationships, and is thus the opposite of our two main characters. The addition of Chika is what really elevates the manga’s comedy to the next level; a lot of the best jokes in the series come from her blundering into the middle of Miyuki and Kaguya’s byzantine schemes, with disastrous and usually hilarious results.

This one gets a solid 10/10 from me so far, and I’ll happily read the rest of it to see if that quality level holds up.