If you call yourself an anime fan, then you almost certainly already know about Chainsaw Man. How could you not! While it hasn’t sold as well as its contemporaries like Jujutsu Kaisen and My Hero Academia, it’s still an incredibly popular series with a passionate fan base that has created countless pieces of fan art, cosplay, and more. Now, as it was announced this week that creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Retrospective will also be adapted into an anime based on footage from the same slate in 2021 – I couldn’t find a better excuse to top the beast that is Chainsaw Man, Check out some great one-offs from other cartoonists.
Like most mangaka, Fujimoto didn’t start out as a hit like Chainsaw Man. He actually had another series before Saw Man, Fist of Fire, but today we’re just focusing on the one-shot (especially since Fist of Fire was…a lot). Fujimoto’s early work is actually divided into several volumes called Tatsumi Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man, titled 17-21 and 22-26. These numbers represent different periods in his creation of the one-shot collection. age.
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I think it’s always a treat to see the earlier, rougher, less thought-out work of an artist who is already highly respected by this time. The thing about “Chainsaw Man” is that it may be dark, but it’s also caring and sympathetic to its characters. Fujimoto’s early work wasn’t always great, and sometimes even teetered on the edge of being too avant-garde. I can’t always blame him, the first story in the first novel was written when he was 17, and I don’t expect young people to be paragons of morality.
What’s interesting to me about Fujimoto’s manga origins is that you can see how he became the storyteller he is today – he even borrowed from himself, like a story called “The Prophecy of Nayuta”, the title of which Design characters were recycled for the second installment of Chainsaw Man. You can see the through line from “not sure what kind of artist I am” to “I’m kind of sure, but there’s still a lot to figure out,” which is one of my favorite types of journeys to observe.
These series cover the works before Saw Man and of course the ones after Saw Man, which is where his best works, Back and Goodbye Eri, come out and really showcase what Fujimoto is capable of . Looking Back, as mentioned earlier, is about making a film, what every artist inevitably ends up making: a work of art about the medium in which it is made, that is, a film about film, a song Songs about music, or in this case, comics about comics.
It’s all about the insatiable desire to make art, and more importantly, to get better at art, and more specifically, to get better at art with friends, simply because it’s with you It feels good to progress with the most important people. Goodbye Eri is an interesting follow-up, as this is where Fujimoto’s love for cinema is most evident, still expressing a desire to create, but in a completely different way. It has some of the most unusual panels in comics, as most pages consist of only four horizontal panels, like stills from the movie.
This fits the theme of the comic, as it tells the story of a teenage boy coping with the death of his mother, life in general, and meeting a strange new friend through his phone’s camera. “Chainsaw Man” is noisy, violent, and visceral, while Fujimoto’s “Look Back” and “Goodbye Eri” are quiet, meditative, and feel like a sad, slow death. Saw is sometimes hampered by its shonen origins, so it’s nice to see someone like Fujimoto (weird, unpredictable, and chaotic) express himself in this way. So before Looking Back is adapted into a movie, take a look at the comic it’s based on, and try out some other comics while you’re at it.
