Aliens, school shooters, teen love, hitmen, and vampires - these are the stories of Tatsuki Fujimoto from ages 17-21, before his bestselling manga, Chainsaw Man.
This volume collects four one-shots, none of which are that great, but it’s amazing that Fujimoto was able to produce four professional-looking short mangas at such a young age.
A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard is the first short, from when he was still a teenager. Aliens invade, wiping out humanity, except for a couple kids who are dressed up as chickens, fooling the aliens. No idea why the aliens assume the roles of the humans but then this is meant as a wacky comic so I guess comedy. The artwork is sketchy but not bad considering his age. The story just isn’t very interesting though with a basic message behind it.
Sasaki Stopped a Bullet is about a student standing up to a school shooter. The premise is exciting with a couple standout moments but the storytelling is a bit all-over-the-shop - Fujimoto’s art has noticeably gotten better since the last one though.
Love is Blind is an amusing story of young love very similar in style and tone to the manga of Keiichi Arawi (Nichijou, CITY) - the mundane is made absurdly tense and melodramatic as a young man builds up the courage to tell a girl that he likes her. It’s cute but nothing special.
Shikaku is the best one here, though that’s not saying much. A hitman is tasked with killing a vampire that wants to die - but finds out quickly that doing this isn’t as easy as she first thought. The artwork here really starts to look like Fujimoto’s current art and the over-the-top action hints at the kind of frenzied stuff he’ll do later in Chainsaw Man. It’s an intriguing premise that doesn’t really go anywhere and ends quite weakly.
Definitely the biggest takeaway from this book for me is how good Fujimoto was at such a young age. Seeing this work makes his enormous success as a mangaka in his twenties understandable - the artwork progresses in leaps and bounds over just a few years as does his understanding of sequential storytelling. Each piece shows his ability improving one after the other - it’s very impressive.
Besides that, the manga themselves aren’t that great - muddled at worst, forgettable at best; most manga fans definitely aren’t missing anything special if they choose to ignore this one. Maybe some of Fujimoto’s ever-growing fanbase might enjoy some of these shorts while they wait for the next Chainsaw Man book but don’t expect the same standard of work that he’s producing these days in this short collection.
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