The Hunters Guild: Red Hood is a haphazardly written, agonizing lesson in why people shouldn’t call a manga “the next Demon Slayer” a week after it begins serialization. I understand fans were getting tired of waiting for another massive franchise to get invested in, but the public consensus was made too quickly and far too many people set themselves up for disappointment. The week-by-week read became agonizing within three chapters and it became apparent that former My Hero Academia assistant Yuuki Kawaguchi cannot structure a story or write compelling characters to save his life. You’d think it would be impossible to fuck up such a simple concept that badly, but time and time again Red Hood managed to blow my expectations out of the water by being even more of a boring, fruitless experience with each successive chapter.

Red Hood’s most glaring flaw becomes immediately apparent within the introductory arc. Characters dump paragraphs of exposition in some of the most shameless and unsubtle ways possible. There’s manga where the slightest bit of exposition would drastically improve the story, and then there’s manga like Red Hood, which make the average HxH chapter look like a picture book. The amount of times the dialogue takes up around two thirds of the page is astounding. Even in the first chapter there’s at least eight to ten speech bubbles on most pages, I’m not fucking kidding. All of this text just accentuates how cluttered and disorganized the art is. You’d think Kawaguchi was trying to rush through all the necessary lore at the start so he could get into the action, but no: all eighteen fucking chapters are like this to some degree. There’s nothing to even guide the viewer’s eyes across the pages, it’s completely counter-intuitive and amorphous. I put together a small compilation to show you how bad it looks: (https://imgur.com/gallery/CF60TgJ)

There’s too much going on in any single page, none of the characters feel like they’re in focus unless the perspective is a close-up of their faces. The art itself isn’t bad, but when Kawaguchi is this bad at setting up the pages he has hardly any chances to really show it off. The pacing of the story as well as the paneling and art drastically suffer when a character has to sit down and explain the entire setting as well as the major factions, characters, and what hackneyed shit like “wolfonium” does. I seriously can’t get over wolfonium, it’s too goddamn stupid even for a series like this.

The MC is the least interesting part of his own story. There’s not much of note about Velou/Vero since he’s just another Deku, Tanjiro or Asta clone. I can appreciate how grounded and quick-witted he is at least, but he’s nothing groundbreaking. Velou gets overshadowed by his huge-tits female mentor, the one who got all the fanart and probably the only reason a lot of people wanted this series to succeed. The villains somehow have more personality than the two leads, the werewolves aren’t mindless monsters either which is pretty refreshing, plus they’re amazingly grotesque and inhuman in design while still retaining the fairy-tale aesthetic which makes them a delight to look at. Red Hood’s designs are probably the best part of the manga. There’s so many inventive aspects to the world that tragically get glossed over in the endless spew of text and dull action sequences.

This interesting fantasy world full of werewolves and other fairy tale monsters, the main reason most fans got invested in the story, hardly gets explored at all; the first five chapters are spent meandering through some town explaining rather than exploring. Everything has to be conveyed through dialogue rather than simply shown to the reader. Every potentially cool moment is ruined by there being ten or more speech bubbles inserted over everything in case you didn’t what incredibly obvious things are occurring. Characters spout their entire motivations for three pages on some occasions and even then they feel hollow and unrelatable.

The series showed some promise when the premise shifted to actually travelling to the Hunter’s Guild, but right after we were stuck with a training arc which shifted into a generic exams arc that turned into a game of cops and robbers with no tension or stakes. Around this time it was confirmed the manga was going to be canceled, so Kawaguchi quickly turned the story into a metanarrative about how destroying stories means destroying a universe to spite WSJ; while I can appreciate the motivation behind this plot development, it comes completely out of left field and makes for an unsatisfying open ending to an already fragmentary manga.

If Red Hood was in the hands of a more competent writer and artist it could’ve had the potential to be a groundbreaking series, but for a manga based around fictional tales it was frustratingly unimaginative. Regardless, I look forward to Kawaguchi’s next work, and I hope he’s managed to better hone his skills to avoid making a mistake of this level when the time comes again. If he can make it into Shonen Jump once, he might be able to manage it a second time.