Tag: Shonen Jump

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Pining For Those SAKAMOTO DAYS

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Picture a killer of legend. The kind of man whose very presence makes the blood of his foes freeze in their veins. Picture an unstoppable, elemental force of violence. Add gray hair and a pair of round spectacles, and you’ve got Taro Sakomoto [Sugita Tomokazu]. Now, picture what it would take to tame that man. Picture what could remove him from this life of ceaseless bloodshed. What could that be? What could possibly get him to hang up his gun?

Well, a pretty store clerk with a winning smile is probably a good start.

This, the tale of an ostensibly-retired uber-hitman, is Sakamoto Days. It’s a member of a particular genre that’s found increased purchase in recent years, a kind of post-Spy x Family melding of action anime with the domestic comedy. Usually involving a fundamentally good natured protagonist who can, nonetheless, throw down with the best of them. Spy x Family has the likable but duplicitous Loid Forger. Kindergarten Wars has its single woman—seeking good man—in Rita. And of course, Sakamoto Days has Sakamoto himself. Sakamoto Days has been a favorite among Jump readers in the know for a good while now, and thus this adaptation comes with a pretty weighty set of expectations placed upon it. For my purposes, I’m not super interested in engaging with that, although I will say this is the rare case of a shonen manga I actually follow somewhat regularly getting adapted into animation, so I’m happy for the series if nothing else. (It’ll be joined in this category by Witch Watch, also from Shonen Jump, later this year.)

Our story really begins when Shin [Shimazaki Nobunaga], formerly one of Sakamoto’s partners-in-crime, is tasked with killing the man. He left “the organization” which he and Shin both belonged to without permission and thus, he’s gotta die. Shin is initially perfectly willing to go along with this, and when he first sees the retired Sakamoto, he’s upset by what comes off to him as weakness. Most obviously, Sakamoto has put on quite a lot of weight in the five years since he retired, and we should take a quick detour to talk about this.

So! Fat jokes! There’s quite a few of them in Sakamoto Days. In the anglosphere, these have generally been considered in poor taste for a good 20 years now, but obviously, this isn’t the case everywhere. I reiterate all this basic-ass explanation of cultural differences just to say, as someone who’s also fairly big, I am not super upset by how Sakamoto Days handles its main character in this regard, even later on when we get into less-jokey but arguably dicier territory. I also think it helps that the character himself seems to have a good sense of humor about it (check the “Slim” shirt in the picture above). But if you are upset by it, I get that, and I’m also not going to tell you you Need To Get Over It or whatever other piece of canned finger-wagging rhetoric a certain kind of anime fan is sure to lean on when people want to discuss this subject. This is an area on which people will understandably be pretty polarized. So at the risk of making it seem more serious than it necessarily is, I think it’s important to just acknowledge that this specific subject gets under some peoples’ skin, and that’s fine. I have a very live and let live approach to arguably-problematic material in the arts, and this is no different a case than anything else, it’s just somewhat new territory for anime I’ve covered on this site specifically.

It is worth noting though, that Shin’s initial judgement of Sakamoto is wholly incorrect. He sees Sakamoto, now grown happy and fat and the proud proprietor of a small konbini with his wife [Aoi, played by Touyama Nao] and their adorable daughter [Hina, played by Kino Hina, no relation], and assumes he’s grown soft in a metaphorical sense, too. This is not so.

Despite some reluctance once he senses that Sakamoto’s killer instincts haven’t actually dulled terribly much—he’s an esper, and can read minds, and is thus treated to Sakamoto’s amusingly gory idle fantasies of stabbing him to death—Shin is eventually convinced to try taking him out. This goes poorly for him, and this is where we get to the anime’s biggest strength.

All told, it is simply just a solid, good translation of the manga’s inventive action scenes to animation. Sakamoto immediately gets to flex both his wits and his still-sharp combat skills here, deflecting a pistol bullet with a gumball and using various other random objects around his store to render Shin harmless. There’s too much slow-mo, and the presence of merely some traditional sakuga instead of wall to wall sakuga will leave some unhappy, but so far, there’s really not a lot to complain about. (I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about the color palette, too. But honestly I think the gritty, somewhat dingy look works well for this series.) The vibe is captured pretty much perfectly.

These setpieces are what Sakamoto Days is about. There is a story, to be sure, a decently interesting one at that, where various characters are torn between the sprawling assassin underworld and the call of a normal, quiet life. There’s comedy, which is amusing if rarely laugh-out-loud funny. And there are also some quite sweet domestic scenes, as well. But the real main concern of Sakamoto Days are these setpieces, wild everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affairs that grew only moreso as the manga went on, and which make a good first showing here. There’s an escalation in the first episode already, even, as Sakamoto opts to rescue Shin once his employers try to take him out for not fulfilling his contract. This second scene is even flashier, all glinting gunmetal, roundhouse kicks, and taser lightning as Sakamoto cuts through a warehouse of goons with ease.

The sell is simply this, if you liked those scenes, you’ll get a kick out of Sakamoto Days. If you like the scene afterward, where Sakamoto hires Shin as an employee at his store, since the esper has nowhere else to go, you’ll like Sakamoto Days a lot. What you see is what you get. I think what we see is pretty cool.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: So Long, CIPHER ACADEMY

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Yes, here we are. It’s the first time I’ve ever written two Manga Shelf columns about the same manga, and it’s for this sad, sad occasion. Funeral for a friend. Or at least, my friend. I get the impression that most Shonen Jump readers would rather chew glass than read all 58 chapters of Cipher Academy, Bakemonogatari author NisioisiN‘s first and, if I had to guess, last contribution to the magazine. Let’s be serious for a moment; I genuinely did like Cipher Academy, in spite of a number of obvious flaws, but there was no way that it was going to last particularly long. It is a terrible fit for Shonen Jump, and is perhaps proof that NisioisiN really just genuinely doesn’t know how to get out of his own way. Especially given that his version of a simple battle shonen plot involves a tangled mess of cryptography and puzzle-solving that only makes any kind of sense about half the time.

That said, it’s easy to claim with hindsight that there was no way Cipher Academy could ever succeed in the context of Jump, but is that actually true? After all, despite its infamously hard to follow “code battles” and goofy storyline, the series does have its fair share of strengths. In particular, Isshin’s ability to hide real character depth inside of weird gimmicks remains unmatched, with characters like Tayuu and her strange, strained friendship with Iroha’s early-antagonist-turned-ally Kyora being a point of genuine interest. And similar examples coincide with the gimmicks themselves being novel, such as Kyora’s filthy mouth and how it contrasts with her ojou-sama demeanor, and how these both belie a fairly caring person underneath that persona. Or Anonymity Requested, who spends most of the manga hidden behind a censor bar both in- and out-of-universe, only for it to become clear that she’s actually both an impulsive hothead and kind of a jerk.

On the other hand, the manga’s biggest weakness is the actual “code battles” themselves, the series’ cutesy name for fast, real-time code-swapping and cracking. A normal battle shonen can rely on any number of visual tricks to make its fights compelling, but Cipher Academy has no access to a majority of those, given that by definition its ‘battles’ are light on actual action. Furthermore, most of them are nakedy convoluted owing to the conceits of the setting. A lot of shonen fights boil down to characters working within sometimes quite complex rulesets in order to outmaneuver and defeat their opponent, but that fact is much easier to hide in something that involves actual combat or a similarly physical activity. In Cipher Academy, it sometimes feels like watching a chess game while only being passingly familiar with the rules.

In general, it both feels markedly less naturalistic and lays bare how dry “a bunch of characters mess around within a given set of rules” can get if not handled carefully. At its worst, the manga devolves into back-and-forth spiderwebs of speech balloons, especially in the case of its many word games. These both suffer greatly in the translation process and also kneecap one of the manga’s best assets; its art. Isshin’s usual, verbose style doesn’t work here, given that this isn’t a light novel.

Furthermore, even later on, when the battles do get a little more visually dynamic, they still suffer from feeling confusing and arbitrary. That’s kind of a problem, given that these puzzles are, on top of everything else, supposed to be user-solvable.

I’ll concede that I have seen some people claim to be able to solve the cryptograms in Cipher Academy, but the fact remains that not only could most people not do so, a good chunk of the readerbase did not even try, and given the way the manga presents these puzzles, it’s tough to blame them. Some of this might be down to the translation—infamously, translating this manga to a satisfactory degree while still keeping MangaPlus’ deadlines was impossible enough that its first official translator walked and had to be replaced—but the manga’s poor performance domestically implies to me that this was a problem across languages. There might also just be a demographic mismatch here; Shonen Jump’s core readership groups are teenagers and people who really like battle shonen as a genre. Neither of these groups are necessarily going to pop for galaxy-brain puzzle solving. Even for those that do, as mentioned, Cipher Academy‘s codes and cryptograms are a mixed bag.

Speaking of “crypto,” we should probably touch on that facet of the manga as well, since, yes, as alluded to in the first chapter, Cipher Academy’s plot does in fact involve cryptocurrency.

Let’s put two facts out there as we do this. One; cryptocurrency is boring. There are people who (incorrectly) think it’s useful or desirable to have, but it’s not interesting in of itself, and if you think otherwise I would love to know how you found my blog from /r/dogecoin. Two; NisiosiN’s writing is not cool. It is a great number of other things; bizarre, ambitious, mysterious, campy, fun, complex, convoluted, goofy, theatrical, self-assured, horny to a sometimes troubling degree, problematic, incredibly autodidactic, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s, etc. But it’s not cool. Isshin is a NEET-ass geek of a writer whose work absolutely drips with evidence that he’s a complete dork. I say this with love, as a fan of some of his work, and as a fellow uncool person, but it’s important to note. NisiosiN’s work has never been and will not ever be cool, and when we’re talking about a Jump manga, that does matter. Combined with the whole crypto / metaverse aspect, I think this was genuinely be a big contributing factor to the manga’s poor performance. You can get away with a lot when you’re writing in this format as long as your stuff is cool. Isshin’s work is fundamentally not.

As for the other stuff, well, cryptocurrency garbage is not quite the PR death sentence over in Japan that it is in the Anglosphere, at least not yet, but that doesn’t mean any regular person actually thinks it’s interesting. At best, they think of it as a way to make money. This fundamentally dull piece of recurring subject matter, when combined with the fact that Isshin is Isshin, plus the generally spotty quality of the puzzles themselves, creates a situation where it’s easy to see how Cipher Academy failed to create and maintain a strong fanbase. There are simply too many hurdles for the average shonen manga reader here. Which would you rather read; this, or a manga where a guy can summon shadow goldfish with a magic katana?

That’s what I thought.

Of course, all this gets at is why the manga failed with its readership at large, which is only half the story. At the top of this article I mentioned that I actually liked Cipher Academy, and that’s mostly true. Why? Well, put plainly, as a fellow-traveler complete dork I tend to find NisiosiN’s particular brand of absurdity more entertainingly silly than obnoxious. But I think, perhaps unfortunately for Isshin, that I’m fairly rare in this regard. At least, rare among the sorts of people who routinely check out new MangaPlus titles.

Cipher Academy‘s central theme is that of code creation as communication. This idea that by hiding things about yourself on purpose, you’re more likely to be honest with people who can see through that obfuscation. The manga does a few interesting things with this, including a really great early moment where Iroha basically sneaks his entire backstory into a code battle a good 30 chapters before we get most of it spelled out in plain-text. Things like this make Cipher Academy‘s best moments feel actively rewarding instead of just convoluted. It’s also worth noting that Yuuji Iwasaki’s art is consistently great and occasionally fantastic, and may be the best part of the series overall.

Unfortunately though, I think trying to get people onboard a manga this willfully obtuse for a handful of moments where what it’s trying to do actually clicks is a tough sell no matter how you slice it. By the end of its run, even I was bored with Cipher Academy, and as it wears on—and the effects of its looming cancellation become more and more obvious as plotlines are condensed and rushed through—it becomes harder and harder to root for. By the conclusion, I was pretty much fed up.

Indeed, if we turn the manga’s theme of the cryptic-as-the clarifying back on the manga itself, we’re left with a decidedly unflattering portrait of its author. The manga’s final chapters offer simple and clean solutions to massive problems; wars end with a handshake, and the real global problem is a lack of mutual respect. This is an uncharitable read, but its emblematic of the problems found in some of Isshin’s less refined work, and “less refined” really does just define Cipher Academy in general. The whole thing ends in a giant, glossed-over shrug, and a decidedly unearned (and very boring) happy endings epilogue, because it has neither the time nor depth to do anything else.

At the end of the day, the problem is obvious. NisiosiN’s greatest strength as a writer is also his greatest weakness, his ability to absorb and scramble basically any kind of theme or subject matter into a fresh and surprising story. Cipher Academy, frustratingly, is those things, it just isn’t terribly coherent. Describing the series to someone else makes it sound like the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist; cryptocurrency vaults, the NSA infiltrating high schools, child soldiers with real guns that look like toys, dancing prisoners of war, superpowered cheerleaders, hyper-advanced spy tool glasses, and so on, but unlike Isshin’s best work, Cipher Academy can’t actually support all of this, and when it tries to, it veers from “goofy” into “just generally wretched.” It’s too brief and too tossed-off to explore most of its ideas in detail, so on the rare occasional it gestures to them, it feels unfinished and almost insulting. Much of the manga ends up reading like a random sampling of whatever ideas happened to furrow their way into Isshin’s head as he wrote it. He’s a ridiculously prolific writer, and this smashed-open spigot approach has led to some great work, but Cipher Academy is a decidedly minor piece of his bibliography.

I won’t discount the possibility that Isshin’s real crime here is greatly overestimating his readerbase (up to and including yours truly), and that if read from a certain angle, Cipher Academy somehow makes more sense and coheres into some kind of wonderful whole. I liked the series for the moments where it clicks, its colorful cast of bizarre characters, and its great art. But—and I can’t say this too loudly—the ugly fact is that those things alone aren’t enough to float a manga in the most competitive magazine in the industry, at least not for very long. As it stands, this is a minor work from a guy who has done much, much more interesting stuff. I doubt anyone but Isshin’s true diehards will remember this manga existed even a few years down the line. So it goes.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: Forging a Myth in KAGURABACHI

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

The life cycle of a meme—in the casual, internet sense of that term—is weird. Things can randomly spark some kind of cultural flame and within mere months you go from joking about, how, say, Morbius is the greatest movie of all time to it getting a second theatrical release and managing to flop twice. Simply because Shonen Jump is not as much of a presence in Anglophone pop culture as the MCU, Kagurabachi, a new title that began serializing earlier this week, is not there yet. Nor, unlike the Morbius example, is its fandom entirely ironic. But the same snowballing effect is there, if in a different way; something has a solid first chapter, maybe an exceptional one depending on your feelings on the all-sword-slashes-and-shadows school of shonen manga storytelling, and suddenly, there are lengthy copypastas calling it the greatest manga of all time, tweets about non-existent anime, game, and live-action adaptations, budget cosplays, a Discord server with some 4,000 members, and about a million jokes that all manipulate the same promo image of the protagonist drawing his sword. As of Thursday (9/21/23, for those of you reading this in the future), Shonen Jump’s English Twitter account has acknowledged the bit, so god only knows where this will eventually end.

This doesn’t need to be said, but just to get it out there; this is all pretty firmly tongue-in-cheek. I think perhaps the most telling of any of these memes that I’ve seen is the Kagurabachi bingo card, which allows for a number of standard contemporary action shonen plot beats. Plus the possibility that the series will either A) get an anime, B) flop outright, or C) get axed before either of those can happen. It also has the concession that the plot might end up being “basic.”

Nonetheless, however much or little irony any individual person making these images might have regarding their feelings for the series’ first chapter, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t something there. In comparison to its Class of ’23 contemporaries, Kagurabachi does indeed have a more immediately thrilling opening chapter than many. Time will tell if that holds up, of course—and even if it does, ongoing quality is not a guarantee of continued success. Just ask any fan of Ruri Dragon, myself included—but it’s worth at least looking at that promise, and figuring out what’s underneath all these jokes.

Kagurabachi‘s actual premise is so simple that the official summary is only a few lines long. Here it is, in its entirety:

Young Chihiro spends his days training under his famous swordsmith father. One day he hopes to become a great sword-maker himself. The goofy father and the serious son–they thought these days would last forever. But suddenly, tragedy strikes. A dark day soaked in blood. Chihiro and his blade now live only for revenge.

Kagurabachi, Manga PLUS Official Summary

True to that curt summary, what little we have of Kagurabachi so far paints it as a fairly straightforward tale of bloody revenge. There isn’t anything even remotely wrong with that of course; manga as a medium is rife with those, and some of them are very good.

We open on a bit of scene-setting, with Chihiro, as a young boy, living with his father while the latter runs a sword smithy. Chihiro’s father is eccentric, despite what one might assume from the gritty nature of his profession, and he’s introduced to us as talking with his pet goldfish. To hear him tell it, they have a lot to say.

Throughout this scene, we get little dollops of information about the world. The setting feels broadly contemporary, but Chihiro’s father’s friend, a fellow named Mr. Chiba, alludes to something called the “Seitei War” that Chihiro’s father’s swords somehow helped end. How mysterious.

For his part, Chihiro seems rather unimpressed by his old man’s reputation. In fact, as it’s nearing his fifteenth birthday it really seems like what Chihiro wants most is to follow his pa into the family business. He directly says as much, in fact, but his father is hesitant.

His father explains; swords are exemplary pieces of craftsmanship, sure. But at the end of the day, they’re weapons. Chihiro’s father believes that, whatever role they may have in ending conflict, they are also the tools used to start one, and the swordsmiths themselves are complicit in the lives lost by them. It’s a thoughtful approach. On a meta level, it’s also indicative of the many cultural differences between swords and, say, firearms, as storytelling tools. If one were to turn this guy into a dealer of almost any other kind of weapon, he’d be markedly less sympathetic than the already gray moral tone he has here.

Chihiro reassures his father that he’s willing to shoulder the burden of selling these things responsibly. Satisfied by that answer, his father brings their conversation—and this first, fairly light half of the manga—to a close by reaffirming that he believes in Chihiro.

Cue a timeskip; 38 months pass between two pages.

When we return, whatever city we’re in is not the peaceful one of the opening pages of the chapter. Wherever it may be, sword-toting yakuza rule the streets, and quash any resistance to their regime. That’s grim, if still in line with the fairly mundane world of swords and grit that the opening seemed to promise. But then, we learn that the yakuza are being bankrolled by this guy, a “sorcerer” of some description, who certainly seems to have enough magic to back that label up. In his few, gleefully villainous, pages of appearance here, he grows a black, spiky bush around a rebel’s head, leaving him to suffer until it decays on its own.

This, I think, is where Kagurabachi starts really staking out an identity. This guy’s character design alone is enough to hang a decent starter villain on, and depending on if we ever learn anything of substance about his motives, he could easily become an interesting recurring antagonist, too.

Naturally, when we next meet Chihiro he’s 3 years and change older, a fair bit taller, and a hell of a lot edgier. His face has been marked by a star-shaped scar, he’s clad in black, and toting a katana of his own. It’s honestly a little much! If you put him in tan instead of black he’d look like an Attack on Titan character. But my opinion on these things remains that it’s better to go hard on your character designs and risk overshooting than it is to play it so safe that you end up at “boring.” If there’s an artistic misstep here, it’s the former, not the latter.

Chihiro and Mr. Chiba (notably, Chihiro’s dad is nowhere to be seen) stride into the aforementioned yakuza city with, initially, plans to negotiate. Then they see a clutch of dead bodies hanging from a bridge, and at this point, the remainder of the chapter dissolves into pure action. Chihiro and Chiba can’t abide by what they’ve seen, so they bust up the yakuza controlling the city, and here, we learn just what it is that makes Chihiro’s father’s swords so special.

If you’re going to reveal that your protagonist has some kind of hidden power or technique, this is the way to do it. The sequence spans a few pages here, but it’s legitimately pretty damn cool, with Chihiro’s sword apparently possessed(?) by three inky goldfish specters which annihilate the rest of the yakuza in just a few swings.

This is not enough to pin a whole manga on, but it’s damn sure enough to pin an opening chapter on, and I think this particular trick is where Kagurabachi is getting most of its hype from right now, no matter how much ironic attachment there may or may not also be.

In general, this really is a strong first chapter, and it does a good job of providing emotional context for the burst of action that is going to be most of the reason Shonen Jump’s target audience pick this thing up. Clearly, something happened to Chihiro and his father. One does not go from a snarky but otherwise well-adjusted kid to an angel of death due to happy circumstances. Time will tell if the series can keep this momentum going, but I would say that the series’ surging popularity is, at least at this very early juncture, well-earned.

There are some weaknesses here, too, of course, very few manga absolutely nail everything right from chapter one. (The handful that do are exceptional for a reason.) The character art tends toward a bit stiff, and other than Chihiro himself and the villainous sorcerer I’d like to see the designs get a little more wild. The translation also tends toward the just slightly too-corny, with Chihiro calling the villains “slime” sticking out as a particularly bad offender. Of course, that part is not mangaka Takeru Hokazono‘s fault, and really, these are minor gripes more than serious complaints anyway. Overall, this is a very good first chapter, especially considering that it’s Hokazono’s first proper series.

At this early point, all that’s really left is to see what shape, if any, the series’ raw potential takes, not unlike the unforged swords in the chapter’s opening pages themselves. The manga’s early fan community will be a huge boon to it if it can manage to pull a good story from this setup (and if it can keep delivering on the action), and no amount of ironic distance will diminish that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: KINDERGARTEN WARS and The Struggle to be Loved

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. His codename is “Spade”, real name unknown and unknowable. He’s an assassin, a stalker in the shadows and a kiss of death to the unwary. He will kill anyone, anywhere, for the right price.

And unfortunately for him, this is not his story.

Kindergarten Wars doesn’t care much about Spade, who gets capped in the head not long after this and is not an important player in this story. The other person in that image, the woman who blocks his sniper bullet with a shovel, is our real protagonist. And I have to start this column with a confession; this was originally a completely different Manga Shelf article. I want to survey the recent rise in manga that take at least some degree of inspiration from Spy x Family and examine what they did with that influence. I still might write that column someday, but Kindergarten Wars deserves a spotlighting of its own. This is some good stuff. Of just 21 currently-available chapters, it does take a little while to find its footing, but once it does, it hits hard. This is a little surprising given its premise, which is goofy even by the standards of this emerging subgenre.

Speaking of, even though this column is no longer about the Spy x Family….Family, we should at least briefly define what “this subgenre” actually is, as there are a few common points. In particular, these manga usually juxtapose absurd, highly “genre” elements; mostly ridiculous hyperviolence, leagues of assassins, international conspiracies, a sprawling criminal underworld, etc. with down-to-earth concerns, and a particular focus on domesticity; romance, family, friendships, and finding one’s place in the world. The simple and slow things in life. Without fail, they come to the conclusion that the latter is better (and in this sense they find some common ground with the rather more out-there Chainsaw Man), and is the real thing worth fighting for. No one in any of these manga has ever truly been fulfilled by being a gun-toting killing machine. They’re fulfilled by little things; dates, shoujo manga, the laughter of children, and whatever found family they manage to rustle up along the way. Other than SpyFam itself, the most successful example is probably Sakamoto Days, which, if Kindergarten Wars isn’t also taking that series as an influence, its similarities are remarkable for being convergent evolution.

As for our actual premise? Nothing too weird for an action manga these days. Rita—that’s the lady blocking a bullet with a spade—works at the world’s safest kindergarten, Kindergarten Noir, where the children of the wealthy and influential are sent so they can receive a normal education away from the dangers of the world. The only problem is that the school is the frequent target of assassins and kidnappers, meaning that these teachers have to also be world-class bodyguards for their students. Rita is an ex-assassin herself, formerly a human swathe of destruction nicknamed the Witch. Not that you’d know it by looking at her, for most of the manga’s current run; despite her deadly skills, Rita is a gremlin obsessed with finding a hot boyfriend, and that contrast is where the manga gets most of its more comedic elements from.

To be honest, while this is hardly a bad gag, it is the primary reason that I way underestimated Kindergarten Wars when I first flipped it open. The series’ first several small mini-arcs are primarily comedic, and while they do still have the violence angle to supply some solid action, they’re more about humor and small-scale character developments. For example, Doug, Rita’s coworker and a secondary protagonist, develops a crush on her when she saves his life, despite a past as a swindler and a ladies’ man. This sort of setup is typical of this very early part of the manga, and is also the fuel for the manga’s “romantic” side, given that romcoms are a part of its DNA as well. You get a bit more of an idea as to where all of this is going when we’re introduced to Hana Bradley, the manga’s other main female character and who it hilariously tries to play as a comparative straight man despite the fact that her preferred method of attack is batting homeruns with live grenades. Still, where Kindergarten Wars goes from decent but unremarkable to actually feeling like it’s worth following is in its most recent half dozen or so chapters, where we get a peek at an inner darkness that may betray more ambition than might be expected.

Chapters 14-18 mark a turning point, and it’s here where we should consider two things. One, Rita’s old assassin nickname/persona of the Witch, a lingering phantom of her old self who threatens to come to the fore every now and again. Two, the character Natasha, a swordswoman just as deadly as Rita herself who is obsessed with The Witch, seeing her as a lone kindred soul in a world full of people who are otherwise nothing like herself.

Natasha, hired to attack the kindergarten just like any number of the scores of dead goons from earlier in the series, eventually confronts Rita directly, only to find herself absolutely perplexed that she doesn’t enjoy fighting this woman. If anything, she feels scared. All of this happens as we flash back through Natasha’s life as a prodigal killer. And all at once, like a bullet through the brain, a revelation hits Natasha; a blunt, heavy, deeply unsubtle and direct statement of what can only be the manga’s core theme.

This all manages to capture a very real desperation, from the mouth of someone who feels like she never had any other options in life. Trying to talk yourself into being satisfied with your place in the world is a rough thing even when that place is somewhere fairly innocuous. For Natasha, this revelation breaks her, and unfortunately, she doesn’t survive the arc. Chapter 18 is an entire postscript of her dying thoughts as Rita holds her in her arms. For just a little while, Kindergarten Wars transforms into something greater than the sum of its parts, and the spilled blood spells a plea for empathy.

It’s easy, and not at all wrong, to say that none of this is exactly revolutionary. God knows this isn’t the first manga to feed a character a line like “If I keep on killing, what will I find beyond it all?!”, but just dryly relaying the story in descriptive prose doesn’t capture its emotional impact and neither does chopping, cropping, and dropping select pages, even very good ones. There’s some real weight here, partly just from how much of a swerve this is from Kindergarten Wars‘ usual style, which is pretty lighthearted even as buildings and heads alike explode. Natasha seems like an early sign of things to come, and combined with more recent revelations about the actual nature of Kindergarten Noir it seems like the series is gearing up to tackle its first larger, more ambitious arc.

We should be taking all of this in context, of course. “Ambitious” is not a synonym for “good,” and there are plenty of ambitious manga and anime that have been done in by their own inability to stick to a single tone or topic. Most of what happens in Kindergarten Wars is still pretty cartoony, and its flashes of a more sincere and resonant emotional core are exactly that, flashes. We haven’t been handed a bombshell that turns this into a must-read just yet, even if some stories (like Natasha’s) are very good, they’re still playing with recognizable shapes. Time will tell what it eventually combines them into.

That’s what the cynical part of me says, anyway. The optimistic part says that the fact that something like this is being so well-received despite its obvious influences is evidence that there is an appetite for this kind of stuff, and that manga like Kindergarten Wars are rising to the occasion. Maybe it just wants to be loved, too.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: RURI DRAGON

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.

Yes, we’re doing this now. In addition to my first impressions articles about new anime, I will also be occasionally dropping articles about new manga serials, since keeping up with brand-new manga is actually a thing one can reasonably do nowadays. (This was not so when I was younger, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Ruri Dragon, the proper serial debut from the mangaka Shindou Masaoki, marks the first of these. It’s a manga with a dead-simple premise that I’m more than a little shocked I haven’t seen done before; high school girl is a dragon. Specifically, she’s a dragon-person. Think Tohru from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid minus the tail (so far) and you’ve got a decent broad idea of where we’re going here.

In addition to that manga, the series opens with a sequence that actually reminds me a little of The Demon Girl Next Door (Machikado Mazoku to most of its readers). Previously-ordinary high school girl wakes up one morning to find out that she’s sprouted horns from her head. A surprisingly snarky sense of humor ensues, which immediately endeared me to Ruri, and which I think will serve it well over the long run. (And it makes the titular Ruri herself feel authentically “teenager-y.”)

Almost immediately, we get a good sense of both the titular Ruri’s personality and that of her mother. The latter in particular has an interesting devil-may-care attitude that could easily be mined for comedy, drama, or both. The woman didn’t even tell her own daughter that her father’s a ryu! That’s a pretty wild thing to just not tell your kid! To her credit, though, Ruri demonstrates an admirable ability to roll with it all, and mostly seems to find the subject awkward, at least initially.

She even insists on going to school, despite her mother offering to let her stay home. (Direct quote from the English translation; “They’re just horns. Not a huge deal.”)

Over the course of her day, we meet her friend Yuka and see how Ruri tries to adapt her daily routine to this unexpected intrusion. Right away, people—starting with Yuka herself—don’t entirely buy the whole “half-dragon on her dad’s side” story. The reactions of those around Ruri, which range from skepticism to finding her horns freaky-cool to her teacher initially assuming they were some kind of fashion statement, certainly seem like the groundwork for some kind of subtext, but it’s too early to make hard calls on this sort of thing. (Although there’s almost certainly a puberty metaphor running through here, as we’ll get to momentarily.)

In particular, the class boys take an immediate interest in her newfound noggin-knobs. Which is enough to make me ponder a similarity between the horns and a certain other part of the body that grows in pairs and gets AFAB girls unwanted reactions in high school, but perhaps I’m leaning too Freudian here. (Also; a serious shout out to translator Caleb Cook for the page on the right here, where he decided to translate something as “gurl.” Love it.)

Even the girls want a piece of Ruri.

And on that day, Background Student A discovered something new about herself.

This all culminates in a scene where basically Ruri’s entire class is congregating around her to take a picture. It’s pretty cute, though in her position I’d be extremely uncomfortable, myself. (And she doesn’t entirely seem comfortable either, to be honest, given that she mentions to Yuka a few pages later that she’s not really “into chatting.”)

“Hey girl, you a demihuman?” may go down as one of the all-time great pieces of translation work for Shonen Jump.

She eventually mentions surprise that she only has horns, and not any other “dragon-y” features. Ruri, it would seem, has a talent for jinxing herself, because barely a page later, she sneezes in class and lets out a truly impressive gout of fire, singing the hair off of one of the boys who was harassing her earlier. (That’s called karma, children.)

But things are not all fun and games. In a surprising turn of pseudo-realism, Ruri being able to breathe fire doesn’t automatically mean that her throat insulates her from her own flames, so the immediate fallout of that sneeze is a sudden and shocking amount of blood loss, which promptly causes her to conk out on the classroom floor.

Thankfully, her injuries aren’t life-threatening, and when her mother arrives to the school nurse’s office a few pages later she sees Ruri swapping usernames with the nurse in some mobage, in a sweet and humanizing minor detail.

It’s her conversation with her mom after she leaves that’s the most revealing though, and it’s here where I feel Ruri Dragon displays most of its potential.

Ruri is pretty obviously confused and at least a little hurt that her mom never told her about any of this. She directly says as much.

And it’s worth noting how her mother seems to unintentionally reinforce that loneliness, talking primarily about her own feelings, how “freaked out” she was, making excuses for herself while also trying to reassure Ruri that she’s an expert on dragons now, having apparently met up with Ruri’s father while Ruri was at school. (This raises even more questions; you’ve had contact with this guy the whole time and you still didn’t tell her about any of this? Maybe dragons do things differently, but in a vacuum, Ruri’s mother comes off pretty bad here.)

But if any of this is followed up on in a serious way remains to be seen. Perhaps more important than any of this is Yuka, who sends Ruri a group selfie that Ruri was squeezed into sometime during the school day. Upon receiving it, Ruri laughs, remarking that the picture has nothing to do with her horns at all. So, while the final shots of this first chapter are Ruri and her mother preparing to have a talk about her draconic heritage, it is the image of the photo that sticks with me most strongly as the chapter closes. After all, at her core and horns or not, Ruri is just a girl.

The Takeaway: With its future direction a total question mark, down to basic facts like even its genre still up in the air, Ruri Dragon is a total wildcard. But! The first chapter is roaring with potential; excellent art and writing abound, and the series has a fun, droll sense of humor. For these reasons, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The second chapter serializes on June 19th, 2022. If you’d like to keep up to date with the manga, I recommend doing so via MangaPlus, where it is available legally, for free, in English.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.