I remember hearing about Fire Punch and how great that manga was a couple of years ago. I heard plenty of stuff about it being this weird and charming thing that some people were really into. Sadly, i never got into it myself but i did remember the name of it's author long after that manga was finished, Tatsuki Fujimoto. So when i heard about this man serializing a manga on shonen jump it caught my attention for sure, but for some reason i just didn't feel like reading it while it was releasing.
Time has passed, and the manga finished its successful run on shonen jump already.
So after hearing so many great things about it from a lot of people i finally decided to read Chainsaw Man and see what it was all about.

First things first: i didn't know a single thing about chainsaw man before reading it. Sure, i had seen some pages out of context but i had no idea about what kind of story it would be. And im happy to say that this manga surprised me from beginning to end and kept me both engaged and extremely excited to keep reading. To the point that i read the entire thing in no more than 2-3 days (which is saying a lot because i usually take my time with manga).

If you want a quick review of it: just go read it right now. It is definitively worth your time and if you are still unsure just watch this promotional video for one of the volumes and judge for yourself, if you like what you see in here you are going to love it for sure. And if not, theres always plenty of other stuff to read. Have you heard about Claymore? it's really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPB_J6Egi28

Chainsaw man is one of the most unique stories i've seen in a while, even from the very beginning there's a sense of uniqueness to it. We are presented to a protagonist that is pretty much the most miserable human being on earth that doesn't even know what bread with jam tastes like. Together with a little devil dog called "pochita".
Apparently there are devils on this world and you can make contracts with them (if you can afford to pay the price...) in order to use their powers, so with the first chapter alone we can already get a taste of the tone of the series and what to expect. What kind of world this is, the type of people that inhabit it, and how unaware of it's own reality the protagonist is.

Denji is our protagonist, a 16yo teen that as a little kid had to overcome the tough situation that the suicide of his father left him in. Given that his father was mired in debt and because of this he had to work every single day of his life in everything he could to slowly pay for it while the yakuza constantly harassed him. Needless to say, this kid had no education whatsoever. He spent all of his time working shitty jobs and even sold some of his organs to try to eventually be able to finish paying his debt. And this is essential to the plot as his lack of overall experience when it comes to simply living (even something as simple as having friends, having a bathroom, taking baths, he simply didn't have) is one of the key elements that gets developed as the story progresses and is to my mind of the most interesting aspects of the narrative. Seeing a person go from nothing, to having a little, to then having something that we can finally call more or less "decent". And how the psychology of a character like this works.

Denji goes from nothing to having a job, a house, friends and obligations. And seeing him slowly grow little by little, seeing how he gets more aware of his reality and surroundings as the manga progresses was to me one of the highlights of the narrative.
But this story isn't about Denji alone, it's about the world around him and what he means to the world as a piece of a puzzle that slowly gets revealed, while also being about the relationships between each characters. Characters that feel unique, distinct and really refreshing in many ways.
In fact i would say that this manga just feels so damn refreshing overall, with a distinct artstyle from Tatsuki Fujimoto that feels stylish, brutal and raw. I fucking love how this man approaches his illustrations and how he can make one feel a sense of scale with each fight scene. The fight scenes remind me of Gantz, and how in that manga each enemy felt like this unstoppable killing machine that needed to be stopped but couldn't be done through raw strenght alone, and how much destruction each of these enemies brought to each city before being brutally murdered.

Each fight feels so energic, exciting and important. There's genuine tension and a fear that someone might get killed at any time. Because this manga doesn't fuck around with it's characters. People CAN and WILL die, and not knowing who can die or even when keeps the reader engaged and genuinely interested. Every single time there's a big event we can feel the tension, and as a reader i approached each arc with fear that things might go wrong any minute and that my favorite characters were inevitably going to either lose some limbs or straight up die.
And the way in which Fujimoto manages to capture just how brutal these fights can be through his artwork is fucking amazing. This man knows how to draw blood and shit flying around, and this might sound silly but when you actually get to reading the manga hopefully you will get what i mean.

Another thing that i really liked about the manga as a whole is that it doesn't waste any time throwing info dumps at your face, the dialogue is pretty direct and there aren't many if even any scenes of characters thinking about useless stuff in the middle of a battle. Things just happen in effective and straightforward ways and i feel like that straightforwardness is a key part of what makes this manga so great. It's relatively short, only 97 chapters and each chapter is around 20 pages long. It doesn't take a genius to realize that you can perfectly binge this manga in a single night.

Characters are imperfect human beings that suffer from all kinds of things, and most have some kind of trauma that leads to a motivation or goal. Which means that for the most part it's really easy to get these characters due to their straightforward nature and it's even easier to find them charming and have fun with them. Even the side characters are charming and interesting, not to mention just how fun the interactions between all of the characters are.
I could read entire pages of these guys simply rambling about whatever weird shitty topic they decide to talk about with a smile on my face and laughing like an idiot. As i said, there isn't an overabundance of dialogue so the dialogue that IS there is really effective, fun and charming.

When it comes to it's humor this manga has a pretty twisted and kind of dark sense of humor that i can totally get behind. I loved every single page where Power annoyed the shit out of either Denji or the rest of the cast. It's just so fun to see the kind of jokes and pranks that these twisted individuals pull off on each other while maintaining a spirit of camaraderie and friendship.

And despite the twisted situations that our characters get into, there is still plenty of space for heartfelt interactions and emotional moments. You genuinely get to feel for these characters, and you come to care about both primary and secondary characters alike.

I feel like Chainsaw Man at it's core is a story about learning to overcome struggles, about what makes us human and how empty it can feel to finally achieve something that we have been trying to get for a long time. And how even after our initial goal, there is always something else that we can look forward to even in the face of despair. How we as humans are these adapting creatures that change and evolve through time, and i feel like Denji is a perfect protagonist that embodies each and every one of these characteristics. We become more fond of him as the manga progresses, and we see his development from a low life nobody to someone that while still not perfect, has clearly learned a lot and will keep learning, becoming more human each and every time.

But if there is something that i want people to take out of this review is that this thing was serialized on shonen jump, and not only that but it had a successful run and managed to maintain an increasing level of quality. Which i fucking love because we need more Chainsaw Man, we need more shonen like this, shonen jump needs more of this. I am a fan of shonen to the core and i love most of what has come out in recent years, but i can't help but feel bored and dissapointed at how many concepts, ideas, and stereotypes are constantly being reused in shonen. I want to see more stories with characters that feel like actual imperfect human beings, and i also want to keep seing more weird stuff. Because Chainsaw man is weird and i love it, we need more weird like this manga. Go crazy with your stories and characters, create something that resonates with people and try to make it different.

I don't mean that now every manga should start killing plenty of characters and be fucking weird just because, don't get the wrong idea. i simply want more stories that feel distinct and unique from one another. And hopefully Chainsaw Man can set an example for creators to want to get more creative in their work and allow for shonen jump to be more open to creators going wild with them.

The success of Chainsaw Man is to my mind, a victory for us as readers. As hopefully now shonen jump will allow for more creators to do their thing and this could also invite more readers to seek non conventional stories. Which means that, with a bit of luck, we might get more exciting and refreshing stories to read.