Chainsaw Man and Look Back: Violent love in the comics of Tatsuki Fujimoto

Does whatever a chainsaw can

2020’s Shogakukan Award for shonen manga was shared between Soichiro Yamamoto’s Teasing Master Takagi-san and Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man, a comically constrasting pair of titles. Teasing Master Takagi-san is about the masochistic joys of being lightly if constantly bullied by a cute middle-school classmate in an idyllic sunshine-drenched island setting; it might be the most wholesome ongoing shonen manga. Chainsaw Man, which concluded its 97-chapter run last December (though a sequel is in the works), has little in common besides the masochism: there are dozens of dismemberments, including that of its protagonist, in its first chapter alone. Yet it turns out to be one of the most moving serialized manga ever, and one of the greatest, at least out of those that had the decency to wrap up in under a hundred issues, and its reputation continued to grow post-publication—the first tankobon is currently the best-selling adult graphic novel in the United States. Then last month Fujimoto released a surprise one-shot, Look Back, totally different in style and subject matter (though with some thematic commonalities we’ll get to later), and, page for page, an even stronger work. If there’s an all-media award for best narrative artist during the pandemic, he should be a frontrunner.

The 27-year-old Fujimoto seems to be a genuine weirdo otaku—he has an encyclopedic knowledge of manga and and since 2013 he’s tweeted from the point of view of a third grade girl. He broke into manga as a teenager through one-shot competitions, which he won prizes in throughout his time studying oil painting at art school. While that undoubtedly helped him to express story visually, often has long stretches without dialogue, his overall narrative sense is strongly shaped by movies. (His advice to budding mangakas: get Netflix.) His first series was Fire Punch, which I made it through one volume of—it was trying too hard for shock value with the cannibalism and incest and whatnot. Chainsaw Man doesn’t start out any less gruesome. In the first issue, indebted naive teen Denji turns to devil hunting (after running out of superfluous organs to sell) and promptly gets hacked to literal bits, before his kawaii chainsaw devil pet becomes his heart and, after a bloodbath, the beautiful but weirdly unsettling Makima recruits him for a job with public safety. The crucial difference with Fire Punch is that Chainsaw Man loves jokes, finding none too lowbrow: after Denji squabbles with his minder Aki, he kicks him in the balls repeatedly and blames it on a testicle devil. (The pair become best buddies, of course.) Denji is partnered with fiend Power—fiends are different from devils; it’s important but not that interesting—and agrees to rescue her cat if she helps him fulfill his life’s goal: touching “boobs.” Much kudos goes to translator Amanda Haley, who excels at finding the right register for each character, which for Denji is initially very crude.

Fujimoto, however, keeps reseting your expectations of what kind of comic this is. Denji becomes a member of a devil hunting team, and it looks like we might settle into a “cool young people fight increasingly powerful supernatural beings” manga a la Bleach, only, well, it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that not many of Tokyo Special Division 4 are standing at the end of the series. While the violence ramps up, the stupid comedy gets incredibly sophisticated, primarily through the Denji-Power double act, which approaches Stephen Chow levels of idiotic genius, and the hapless Kobeni, whose parents gave her the choice of devil hunting or sex work to pay for her brother’s college. Whenever something good happens to her, whether getting a subcompact car or an ice cream, it’s a signal that some disaster or another is about to strike.

By mid-series, what this adds up to is an assured, highly entertaining series peppered with awesome (in both the modern and the 17th century sense) images. Chainsaw Man’s sky-to-train battle with Katana Man! Chainsaw Man riding a Shark Fiend! It’s as wild as the campiest Silver Age superheroes, only as in the work of Grant Morrison, it’s at its most serious when it’s joking. Then Fujimoto switches gears again. While there had been (lots of) character deaths earlier, it’s at this point that the series turns into tragedy, and remains so for basically the rest of the run. Again, this doesn’t mean the humor lets up, except for some rare occasions when it wades too deep into potted eschatology, only in addition to ha-ha funny, it’s also crying-face funny. (Read the series and then help me find words to describe the Family Burger scene.) Throwaway gags from before—the ice cream, the shark-riding, the balls-kicking—are recalled and become vital to the plot. There are many severed limbs and much trauma for the characters to process. But when Chainsaw Man finally returns to the tropes of Fire Punch to finish, it feels fitting and proper, proving not only Denji’s maturation but Fujimoto’s. What once was grotesque becomes an act of love.

Half a pandemic year after wrapping up the first run of Chainsaw Man, Fujimoto dropped the 142-page Look Back, which like Chainsaw Man, English-speakers can find translated through Viz’s Shonen Jump subscription service, the best two dollars a month you can spend if you prefer to consume media legally. The art is in a realist style, and freed from the pressure of weekly deadlines, it’s dazzlingly good, from the control of the passage of time to the characterizations through posture, even though a lot of it is just drawings of, well, people drawing. The story is at first about elementary schooler Fujino and her rivalry with fellow budding mangaka, the unseen Kyomoto (yes, look what happens when you put the names together.) As panels and seasons pass, Fujimoto gets across the sweat required to become an artist in a field like manga that requires formal mastery in addition to creativity, and the maladjustment that spending your time that way is associated with (though the causal arrow could go either way.) And then there’s the sheer joy when you luck into finding someone who understands your obsession and with whom you can communicate through four-panel gag strips.

Since this is Fujimoto, however, another subject of the comic is death. Like so many genre works (and indeed so much of the last 4000 years of post-Gilgamesh narrative art), Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man are about staring down mortality face to face, sidestepping it, then flipping it the bird. A fictional character can keep this up forever; a real person can’t. But this doesn’t mean that art doesn’t have value. This is not a novel idea, but rarely has the point been made more artfully that art of even the lowest status, whether four-panel gag strips or shark-based MMA, plays a necessary role in keeping the void at bay—all in a comic that employs only the lightest touch of science fiction. Fujimoto already has little more to prove, and if the upcoming Chainsaw Man anime is as successful as anticipated, he might head off to more lucrative or to higher-status media before long. Or he might keep drawing, because that’s what he does.

Kick, kick, survive.