Fire Punch, Volume 1 by Tatsuki Fujimoto Review

It feels like Tatsuki Fujimoto came up with the main character of Fire Punch first and then worked backwards from there. He’s a naked dude who’s on fire - all the time! - but doesn’t die somehow… and wants punch-y revenge for… stuff. And of course before he realised that he was basically writing Marvel fan fiction because they’ve got a character who can flame on, and another character with a healing factor who’s always getting bits of him chopped off (and is set to share the big screen in his third movie with Marvel’s other famous healing factor character shortly).

The Ice Witch has turned the world cold because she’s the Ice Witch and some random people are popping up with superpowers called “The Blessed”. Everyone’s become cartoonishly evil because snow and Agni, the healing factor dude who gets set on fire forever, becomes the latest victim of one of this dystopian future’s perennially roving evil gangs and sets out to kill the baddie what wronged him. Ho hum.

Fire Punch is an older Shonen Jump series meaning it’s a manga for older teenage boys, hence the eye-rolling edginess of it all. There’s a lotta gore, a lotta grim sex stuff, and a lotta angst, most of which read comedically more than anything, to me anyway. I mean, he’s stuck in one spot - on fire - for 8 years and he doesn’t go mad? And it takes him that long to figure out how to control the fire? Man, he’s so tough. Similarly, the bad guys are so one-dimensionally evil so that Agni is justified when he flames them out.

I didn’t find it totally boring as it’s increasingly amusing how awfully the “good” characters get treated by the “bad” characters. The coup de grace is the guy with the dogs at the end - I didn’t see that one coming! Although, I wasn’t meant to find any of that funny but rather more shocking - which it might be if you’re a child. And that’s who might enjoy Fire Punch: teen boys, because it’s too Shonen-y for anyone else to take seriously. So it’s well-suited to the line it got published in but doesn’t transcend it like better titles do to a wider audience (DBZ for example).

Tatsuki Fujimoto’s a fine mangaka but I’d recommend his less frenetic books Goodbye, Eri and Look Back over absurdly wannabe-macho titles like Fire Punch.