Chainsaw Man's control and chaos
Chainsaw Man is a bombastic take on a shonen manga that ties together gore and simplicity with loose, unrefined, and emotional lines. Starting serialization at the end of 2018, Chainsaw Man is a Japanese series written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto for Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump.
- Content Warning // blood, gore, violence
- Reader’s note: Please read comic from right to left
The story follows the origin story of the titular character and the misadventures of his everyday life as Denji. Living in a world plagued by malicious creatures known as Devils, Denji, an orphaned boy with mounting dues, turns to killing Devils for the local yakuza with the help of his Devil dog Pochita. Pochita is a rarity among Devils as they’ve warmed up to humans after Denji saved them long ago; they now help Denji slay demons with his power to turn into a chainsaw. But when a job goes wrong, Pochita makes the ultimate sacrifice of fusing its body with Denji’s before he bleeds out in the middle of a battle. Reborn a Devil-Human hybrid, Denji, Chainsaw Man, can grow chainsaws from his body at will. Shortly after his emergence, the Public Safety Devil Hunters recruits Denji as a rookie Devil Hunter, only threatening his extermination if he chooses not to. Denji can’t complain as the job comes with free food, shelter, and maybe one day, the chance of female companionship (the one thing on his simple mind as a horny recluse).
The art of Chainsaw Man oscillates between broad panels oversaturated by gore and emptier character- and speech bubble-driven-panels showing everyday life. But between the two, Fujimoto’s sketchy, “unpolished” lines maintain a cohesive look within his style that adds to the grit and energy of Chainsaw Man’s Devil-adapted Japan.
Take, for example, these panels of Pochita and Denji.
And compare it to this page literally five pages later.
Two drastically different scenes are happening. The first is a conversation between Denji and Pochita, arguably the most simplified character in the series thus far. Plenty of Chainsaw Man’s panels look like this — subject-to-subject sequences with blank backgrounds and talking heads. Each panel is flat, save for one-dimensional shadows and screentones.
These panels heavily juxtapose battle sequences like that featured on the second page, wherein shadows are darkened, environments and objects are filled, onomatopoeia jumps in, and chaos is characterized and frenzied. Fujimoto goes all-in, employing both greyscale screentones and cross-hatching for added drama, depth, and flare. Although tonally different, they remain consistent through Fujimoto’s “unpolished” lines. Unlike the trend many contemporary manga favor with unbroken, uniform, clean-cut lines (think Naruto or We Never Learn), Chainsaw Man is drawn rough around the edges.
If you look at Denji and Pochita’s characters from the first page, you can see that Fujimoto went over his lines multiple times, even defining Denji’s chin in the last chapter with jagged scratches rather than a single stroke. This same energy rough-cut energy is seen in the action lines of the zombie hoard. You can see Fujimoto’s pen pressure at work in his varying line weight, and the hooks in his hatches convey not only the speed of the action but also how fast they were put onto the page.
It should be noted that Fujimoto also expresses breaks from popular manga styles in the varying screentones he uses between scenes. There doesn’t seem to be too much consistency between tone patterns; for example, sometimes he’ll throw in polka-dotted screentones over solid panels to add contrast, but there’s no exact formula beyond wanting to add contrast. Sometimes panels with more spread-apart polka dot overlays seem more humorous because of them, but sometimes they’re there purely for differentiation purposes. However, this seemingly random inconsistency plays right into his style. His work is emotional, raw, controlled madness — all of which you can see on his pages. Fujimoto uses screentones mostly during slice-of-life scenes when the lack of action doesn’t call for his pen strokes to take the visual lead.
Despite the varying tones, Fujimoto approaches each scene with the same raw and unfiltered style. They unify and define his work, and narrative-wise, they add to the tone of Chainsaw Man’s story in different ways. Amidst the violence, they heighten the terror and grit of each action, character, and element at play. But within toned-down scenes, it conveys that the manga doesn’t take itself too seriously — it’s laden with sex jokes and potty humor galore if you get a read — while adding a thin layer of unease that looms over the city.
Although Chainsaw Man is primarily black and white, it doesn’t miss out on any of the energy or tone shifts it could have if it were all in color. The only times the manga is colored is for its cover, inaugural pages, special sections, or when shifting story arcs. Although, this is the trend most serialized manga follow nowadays, especially those serialized weekly. In its covers, Fujimoto colors his characters and scenes in bright, oversaturated, contrasting hues that give a bit of a “punk” persona — they scream “you’re in for a wild ride.” In greyscale, however, his crosshatches make up for the missed color and more. Replacing saturation with texture, scenes are even more chaotic and out-of-this world as they make scenes feel busier. That’s not to say that a colorized Chainsaw Man would be anything less, but what’s already present is more than satisfying.
The last thing I’ll highlight from my reading is how Chainsaw Man plays with pacing. Matching its action-packed persona, the manga seems to speed up more toned-down parts of the story through small, text-filled panels and utilizing broken boundaries. Smaller panels with higher densities make long conversations feel as if they take less space. But to still keep things interesting and build momentum, Fujimoto lets his character break the boundaries of their surrounding panels, hinting at their involvement in later panels until the reader finally reaches their box.
For example, in this sequence, Denji and fellow Devil-Human hybrid Power talk as they walk up a hill. From reading the first two panels, you can infer a conversation is happening by the house in the top left panel. With Power and Denji’s characters breaking the frame, however, you can anticipate from glancing at the first row of panels that the conversation is between Power and Denji from their heads poking in, anticipating Denji’s response soon after Power’s first comment. Additionally, this gives a sense of movement happening during these frames since the static boundaries are broken. It is especially apparent on this page where Power and Denji not only break a boundary but are positioned to look up toward this house panel, giving a sense that they are climbing up the hill. Fujimoto cleverly played with the cropped panels to already portray this and the conversation simultaneously, saving him retail space by hitting two birds with one stone.
And with all this free real estate, Fujimoto can now draw out the money shots of his rich, detailed action sequence moment by moment. Take this sequence of Power jumping off of a building; it happens just after we meet her.
Here’s what happened: Power smelled a Devil nearby and jumped off of a building to kill it with her blood-bending abilities. What Fujimoto spent nearly five pages on is summarized in a sentence. Fujimoto spent about the first three pages only growing anticipation, hit the joke on the fourth, and ended with a visual punchline at the very end. This may seem excessive, but this was a kick-ass way to introduce Power’s character and abilities through strong visuals alone. The first half page shows her short-attention span and disregard of social cues with Denji. The second page shows off her power, a cut in her wrist — directly zoomed-in cleverly via the pointed panels — released blood that she turned into a hammer. The next two pages show her strength with a side of comedic timing. And finally, the last page tapers the end of the joke from the previous pages while giving a sense of Power’s callous but hilarious personality from the reaction to her kill.
However, while Fujimoto elongates his action shots and builds tension, he still employs the panel-breaking technique described before to portray movement all the same. You can see it in Power’s sequence, but I can’t help but gush over this one panel from the first chapter. In this, you see Denji slice into the face of a Devil from one angle, but it perfectly aligns to the adjacent panel where Denji sliced into the monster from another point of view. It’s a satisfying bit of momentum where we see Fujimoto push panel experimentation and breakage to the fullest.
Chainsaw Man is a fun read through-and-through for those who need some action in their lives right now. I’ve only read the first volume thus far — just seven chapters — so I can’t give a full review of it or its plot just yet. The story reads as simple thus far, but it’s sprinkled in some thought-provoking questions I hope it answers later, despite brushing them off initially with Denji’s dirty jokes. But what I can vouch for is that Fujimoto’s art and storytelling is an exciting breath of fresh air full of life, energy, and passion.
