A ferocious, ugly-funny opening volume that tears through shōnen conventions with real style, even if it sometimes mistakes shock for substance.
I came away from Chainsaw Man, Vol. 1 both exhilarated and slightly battered. Tatsuki Fujimoto has a savage instinct for what makes a page turn: the premise is outrageous, the pacing is brutally efficient, and the manga throws you into a world where poverty, gore, and deadpan desperation are yoked together with surprising clarity. Denji is an excellent engine for this sort of story — pathetic, hungry, blunt, and oddly touching — and the opening chapters give him just enough humanity for his absurdity to bite.
What I admire most is the visual rhythm. Fujimoto understands panel flow in a very modern, cinematic way: he will hold a beat just long enough for an expression to curdle, then cut hard to a slab of violence or a joke with no soft landing. The art is rough-edged rather than polished, but that roughness suits the book’s sleazy energy. There is a real gift here for ugly comedy — the kind that lands because it is emotionally embarrassed, not because it is clever. When it works, it is very good indeed.
But I do not want to overpraise the volume’s aggression. It can feel adolescent in the narrow sense: obsessed with provocation, rushing past emotional consequences, and leaning on grotesque escalation when it has not yet earned that escalation. Some of the supporting figures are sketched so aggressively that they risk becoming functions rather than people, and the story’s moral universe is intentionally crude to the point of monotony. There is wit here, certainly, but there are also stretches where shock is doing work that character development should be doing.
Still, this is not empty noise. Beneath the splatter and macho absurdity, I detect a real loneliness in Denji, and Fujimoto is shrewd enough to let that loneliness flicker through the carnage. The volume has enough invention, confidence, and formal intelligence to rise above mere spectacle, even if it does not yet cohere into something fully satisfying. It is a sharp, unruly opening salvo: messy, memorable, and more interesting than most shōnen debuts, though not as profound as its most ardent admirers like to imply.
Who should read this
Read this if you enjoy manga that mix black comedy, extreme violence, and anti-hero energy, or if you want to see shōnen conventions kicked in the teeth with unusual style. If you prefer emotional subtlety, moral complexity, or a gentler tonal register, this will probably feel like a barrage rather than a revelation.
A personal note from Tanaka
I respect how hard this book swings. I did not always admire the direction of its punches, but I never found it timid, and in manga timidity is often the greater sin.
Conversation(0)
Join in — no account needed. A name and email are all it takes. Your email is never shown publicly.