Welcome to the Multiversity Year in Review for 2022! We’ve got over 25 categories to get through, so make sure you’re checking out all of the articles by using our 2022 Year in Review tag.
Over the last few years, our site has been focusing more on manga, and so we thought it was appropriate to specifically highlight the mangaka. Because of the grind of manga production, as well as the language barrier, we don’t know as much about these creators as we do the makers of American comics, and so our discussion of their work feels purer, less detached or influenced by popular opinion or personality, than American creators.
3. Gege Akutami
It is pretty much impossible these days to talk about manga or mangaka without someone, likely me, bringing up “Jujutsu Kaisen” and/or its creator, Gege Akutami. The world building, storytelling, character development, ever-growing plot-lines, and plot twists reward readers who have taken the whole combat ladened rollercoaster ride. Whether you are reading along as the new chapters drop on Shonen Jump or Manga plus or awaiting the collected edition, it’s been an eventful and pretty brutal year as the story has progressed through the ‘Culling Game’ arc. Akutami’s writing and art rewards loyal readers with a cleverly told tale full of revealing tidbits about the characters lives, history and secrets of this world throughout the story.
“Jujutsu Kaisen” started following cursed life of Yuki Itadori as his involvement in the Occult Club in regular high school lands him in an encounter with the all too real and deadly cursed object and Megumi Fushigiro who was hunting for it. This was his introduction to the dangerous world of living curses and the people who fight and exorcise them to protect the people of Japan from the supernatural beings spirits and horror that surround us daily. Akutami spends little time preparing Yuji for his new life as his actions dumped him in the deep end from the first chapter of this now twenty one volume story. Over time it’s developed a stunningly huge cast of richly developed characters. This years stories focused almost exclusively on the marvelous supporting cast of characters.
Akutami is a wildly imaginative writer and creator. He taps into Japanese folklore, pulls from modern culture and storytelling tropes and mix it freely. Akutami has proven that nearly any crazy thing can be a cursed technique and can come up with equally crazy ways to employ it. The creativity he expresses makes me think of Jack Kirby and his creative skills. It may be more fair to compare him to the influences they mentioned, mangaka like Tite Kubo and Masashi Kishimoto. Akutami has created something vital and living in my mind. – Greg Lincoln
2. Tatsuya Endo
When I was first told about “Spy X Family,” my reaction was “yeah, that sounds cute, I’ll have to check it out sometime.”
Then the anime was released, and I realized how foolish I was to have not started reading it much, much earlier. How had I gone so long without the Forger family in my life, much less Anya’s expressions? Judging by the amount of people who began cosplaying from the series, I clearly wasn’t the only one (and, I admit, my fiance and I are planning on cosplaying Loid and Yor at some point as well).
So what is it about “Spy X Family” that lets Tatsuya Endo skyrocket to a place on this year’s list for best mangaka? Just the concept alone is enough to make for a great series. We have a spy and assassin living together in a fake marriage, but neither knows the other’s double life—that’s a decent concept on its own, but then we get Anya, their adopted telepathic daughter who gets not only an adorable character design, but also the most amazing expressions ever put to page. Want more? Okay, because there’s also a dog with the powers of precognition (and he is a very good boy), a brother in the secret police, and a huge array of entertaining and endearing side characters.
All the while, the story’s been building nicely. The cast has grown, the characters have faced threats ranging from murderous mercenaries on a cruise ship to troubles at school, and we get to see as the fake family becomes closer to a found family. (Not yet, though. They still have a ways to go.) But we’ve grown attached to these characters and the lives they’ve built, especially as we get to see more of their backstories, including how Loid became a spy.
Continued belowBut a mangaka is responsible for more than just the story, and “Spy X Family” wouldn’t be what it is without the artwork. The character designs are simple but distinctive, with unique looks for each of the characters that make them immediately recognizable and brings out their personalities nicely.
Of course, this is exemplified in Anya’s expressions, which have become memes of their own at this point. Whether it’s her iconic smug smile, look of shock, or moments of just sheer adorableness, there’s very few moments where Anya isn’t stealing the scene.
When Endo-sensei decides to include some action, that looks great as well. Whether it’s Yor fighting off multiple foes or a high-stakes tennis match, it’s clean, fluid, dynamic, and generally a joy to read.
“Spy X Family” has all but made Tatsuya Endo a household name, and for that, he’s earned a place on the list as one of this year’s best mangaka. – Robbie Pleasant
1. Tatsuki Fujimoto
When I first set out to write this entry, I struggled with summarizing what makes Fujimoto’s work worth winning this category 2 years running. I had a whole bit about the inherent sentimentality to it all and his penchant for making his colorful casts of characters feel like real people: bugnuts, awkward, and preoccupied with the strangest, simplest, and yet meaningful things. I briefly dissected how he pushes the medium with every new work he’s released since the already legendarily boundary pushing ‘Public Safety Arc’ of “Chainsaw Man.” I dug into what made his new 200-page on-shot, “Goodbye, Eri,” so affecting and the one-shot he wrote for Oto Toda, “Just Listen to the Song,” the multi-layered oddity it is. But something was getting lost when I did that.
Fujimoto is an artist that never seems satisfied to stay in one place. Not that he jumps from genre to genre, though he sort of does, but in that way where every new project or arc is an excuse to explore some new idea or make some statement about the human condition. He then takes the hyperreal and the fantastic to make those ideas more, whether that’s more fun, more sad, more silly, or more gross.
For example, the opening chapter of “Chainsaw Man” this year features “the chicken devil,” which looks like a dead, plucked, headless chicken walking around and talking like some grotesque meat puppet. Fujimoto then uses that absolutely hilarious set-up to explore humanity’s capacity for empathy and cruelty through character based tragicomedy with character’s we’ve never seen before but are instantly connected with because they feel like the classmates you may have had in high school.
And it’s not that one is a vehicle for the other, where the work is “more” than a bunch of dick jokes and shitposts taken to an absurd level. Instead, they are both tributes to, say, the power of cool guys walking away from explosions as well as meaningful explorations of expressions of grief and loneliness, with all the silliness and emotional baggage that brings. This is all conveyed through the scaffolding of his impeccably rhythmic paneling and chaotic & sketchy yet clear illustrations creating works that disarm with their silliness before revealing the layers that make them pieces of art to come back to over and over and over again.
That’s why Fujimoto gets this win. The absurd grotesqueness, the comfortable awkwardness, the strange yet recognizably mundane motivations, it’s like looking out the window and people watching. The normally sanded down personalities of Jump characters are instead presented in all their strange, horny, messed-up, yet undeniably human glory. They do the things they do, the fuck up the ways the fuck up, because they are only human and sometimes, humans kinda suck, even the ones we love. – Elias Rosner
