New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

This column contains spoilers for Part 1 of Chainsaw Man.

Content Warning: The material covered here contains depictions of extreme violence.

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Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with Chainsaw Man whatsoever. But sometimes, the stars align, and something grips you like it’s trying to choke you out and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes too, that happens just before a long-awaited follow-up is about to start. They say timing is everything because it is, and sometimes that timing works out in your favor. Hence this going up mere hours after the opening chapter of Part 2 drops on MangaPlus.

Suffice it to say we’re bending the rules here, too, since Chainsaw Man Part 2 is only a “new” manga with a fair bit of definitional stretching. (MangaPlus doesn’t even count it as a different series than Part 1.) So if you’re not caught up with the first Chainsaw Man arc, if you’re in the position I was in barely a week ago, I recommend closing this column now and go giving it a read, because I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.

It’s lurid, violent, bleak, coarse, and profane. The medium; a world where humanity’s fears materialize into living beings called devils, and of course, where humans called devil hunters must stop them. A story about bad people dying in worse ways that is not afraid to kill off even major characters sometimes suddenly and without warning, but never feels like it’s doing so for simple wanton shock value. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, easily a best-in-genre for the new decade without much in the way of competition. Part 2 has much to live up to.

The end of Part 1 marked also the end of the so-called “Public Safety Arc.” Denji surviving, nearly totally alone, after a wave of death and disillusionment that saw him shed whatever naivety he may still have had. But he’s come out the other side a better person regardless, even as he was one of just three named characters (four if you count Pochi) to survive the often-brutal first part of the manga.

It’s clear that some amount of time has passed, although perhaps not much. The main point to note here is the continued lionization of Chainsaw Man himself, Denji’s hellish heroic alter ego who now serves as both a source of inspiration to the general public and, going by the Curry Man buns we see in this chapter, marketing revenue. (That’s capitalism, babey.)

But anyone who’s main draw to the manga is Denji himself may be disappointed with the opening of Part 2. Instead, we follow a new character entirely, whose comparative mundanity is almost certainly a deliberate contrast to Denji’s dire circumstances at the start of his own story. Perhaps more importantly, like all of the best Chainsaw Man chapters, the opener for Part 2 begins with some off-the-wall crazy shit.

^{The logic behind this devil being weak is that no one is really scared of chickens. I feel like enough people have read Fourteen for there to be at least something there? Maybe not. It’s not like I’ve read it.}

Our real POV character here is Asa Mitaka. An antisocial, and thus, profoundly normal, high school girl. The only real wrinkle here is that her parents were killed by devils, but that’s not particularly unusual within the context of Chainsaw Man. So the notion of the ordinary high school girl remains.

Don’t worry, she doesn’t stay ordinary for very long.

Mitaka seems to spend most of her days being vaguely annoyed at her classmates and, it’s pretty obvious even before it’s said out loud, jealous of their normal, healthy friendships with each other and, eventually, with Bucky, whose absolutely god-awful chicken puns inevitably endear him to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, the class president tries to get Mitaka to socialize a bit more and open up to the rest of her schoolmates.

Now, anyone familiar with Chainsaw Man would be easily able to tell that something was going to go south here, but I think a lot of people will mistakenly pin the suspicion on Bucky himself. Deliberate misdirection? Maybe. But maybe we’ve just been conditioned to be suspicious of devils over the course of the series’ run so far. Either way, he’s actually a genuinely affable sort by the look of it, and for a brief, split second, you can, if you want to, squint and pretend this is a happy manga where people are allowed to have personal realizations about themselves without an accompanying wallop of massive pain and loss.

Moments after this, she trips and falls, crushing the weak little devil to smithereens. It’s all rather nasty.

The fallout is immediate and predictable, and Mitaka takes this about as well as you’d expect.

The class president, as well as the two’s teacher, Mr. Tanaka, get the idea to visit the poor little hell-chicken’s grave. Tanaka is perhaps under the notion that this will make Mitaka feel better, but the class president quite quickly reveals herself to have a rather different motive, and things promptly get all sorts of gnarly.

In the fractions of a second Mitaka has before this monster—the Justice Devil, per the class president’s own admission—slashes her head in half, she feels relieved, because the president brags that she tripped Mitaka, so Bucky’s death wasn’t really her fault. Implicitly, she’s also relieved that she won’t be hurt anymore. That’s the kind of weapons-grade depressing you can expect from Chainsaw Man.

But it also wouldn’t be Chainsaw Man without some bolt-from-the-blue insane twist, and wouldn’t you know it, even with her head doing its best impression of a rotting pumpkin, Mitaka has just enough presence of mind to witness—and hear—a devilish owl perching on a nearby stoplight.

We don’t hear Mitaka think ‘yes’, but what happens next implies that either she did or the owl even asking was a formality. Not a page later, Mitaka—or at least, something in Mitaka’s body—rises back to her feet, only a truly wicked scar where her head was previously carved in half.

The natural questions follow; “Didn’t you just die?” “What the hell are you?” etc.

Reborn, “Mitaka” replies by doing this.

And introduces herself as The War Devil. What follows is, of course, an absolute show-stopper. Hyperviolence on a level that is hard to even describe with words; somewhere in there between the spinal cord longsword and the hand grenade reconstituted from the Justice Devil’s own actual arm, is the kind of bloody poetry that you really just can’t get outside of comic books. It all ends in an explosion and a shower of gore, because obviously it does, this is Chainsaw Man, remember? This kind of casual “I’m back, bitch” flexing is, if anything, hugely welcome in a medium that is only very rarely kind to even its superstars. This is mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto in a braggart mode he’s earned every right to be in.

^{Bring your own Black Sabbath.}

The chapter’s last page establishes that everything we’ve just seen, if it weren’t already obvious, is an origin story. It’s never a safe bet to call any character’s longevity in Chainsaw Man, but Mitaka (or the War Devil? Or both? It’s a bit hard to say) seems like she’ll stick around for a long while. In the very closing moments here, she makes a comment about nuclear weapons that should be tossing up all kinds of red flags for any long-time Chainsaw Man readers; it’s been established before that those were among the concepts “removed” from reality by Makima’s makimachinations. (On that note; Makima is probably my favorite character in the whole manga, and I think about the only thing this chapter was missing was an appearance by her reincarnated self in the form of Nayuta. But! That will come in time.)

Trying to forecast almost anything about Chainsaw Man is a fool’s game, so I won’t pretend I’ve got anything sussed out. For me, the wait between the old and new Chainsaw Man was only a few days, and even I’m mostly just super happy to have it back. I find it difficult to imagine enduring the whole year-ish hiatus, so I know for sure I’m far from the only person who’s glad to see it again.

Chainsaw Man may well appear here on Magic Planet Anime again in the, ultimately, not-too-distant future, but until then, manga fans.

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