This Week in Shonen Jump: Week of 7/18/21

Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, our weekly check in on Viz’s various Shonen Jump series. Viz has recently changed their release format, but our format will mostly remain the same. We will still review the newest chapters of one title a week, now with even more options at our disposal. The big change for our readers is that, even without a Shonen Jump subscription, you can read these most recent chapters for free at Viz.com or using their app.

This week, Walter checks in with “Look Back.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!

On its face, “Look Back” is another manga about making manga. Rather than dwelling on the specifics of craft, Tatsuki Fujimoto focuses more on the emotional reality of creating manga; there are procedural aspects at play, but the story primarily concerns the motivations and desires of mangaka themselves. After all, the final line of dialogue, addressed to the main protagonist, asks “Then why do you draw, Fujino?” – it’s hard to imagine much more of a direct acknowledgment of the theme in the text.

As someone who has dabbled in a few creative fields (but hasn’t strongly committed to one), the drive that makes one a creative has always been of interest to me. When you hear someone who is devoted to their craft speak about why they create, the specific motivations may vary, but a common underlying theme is a feeling of compulsion. The writer writes, the painter paints, the composer composes because they must. By no means does this mean that compulsion cannot come and go, or that the hobbyist can’t become a “true” artist, and indeed “Look Back” addresses how that compulsion can wax and wane, particularly when faced with other creatives. Fujino’s hobby as a kid becomes more of a drive after first encountering Kyomoto’s art. Then, after feeling like she has made little to no progress compared to the reclusive Kyomoto, she abandons this path for a time, until a chance encounter with Kyomoto in-person sets her back on track to becoming a mangaka. When faced with incredible talent, we can be discouraged – I’ll never be that great! – but we can also be inspired to better ourselves.

The key scene to this reading of the comic is the montage following that question that haunts all creators when they hit a rough spot: “Then why do you draw, Fujino?” Fujimoto follows this question with a series of images across Fujino and Kyomoto’s years of collaboration. The tenderness of these scenes beautifully illustrate one possible answer: the drive to create can be inspired by a desire to create for someone. True, during the times Fujino remembers she was working with Kyomoto, which is a slightly different relationship, but the reader must remember that Fujino’s career continued without her original collaborator. While one could somewhat cynically read this as Fujino trying and failing capture the magic of her prior collaborations, I think a more generous reading is that even after the somewhat negative “breakup” of the team Fujino continued creating for her original fan – and this reading is supported by the reveal that indeed, Kyomoto continued to follow her inspiration’s career. And, besides, what is the pinnacle of collaboration but two or more people creating something with each other, for each other?

When we consider who wrote and drew “Look Back,” however, it opens up further. It doesn’t take much insider knowledge to conclude that “Look Back” is somewhat autobiographical in nature: our main characters are Fujino and Kyomoto; Fujimoto went to art school to study painting; Fujino’s successful manga “Shark Kick” is an obvious riff on the name “Fire Punch,” Fujimoto’s first serialized manga. With this knowledge the narrative instead becomes a metaphor for interior creative struggle. Fujino is first and foremost a commercial artist (in style, not entirely in motivation), while Kyomoto is more traditional. These two aspects of the artist are sometimes in synergy, but can often end up at odds with each other; to devote oneself to one is to at least partially abandon the other. This adds more “meaning” to Kyomoto’s death than might otherwise be apparent in a reading that is divorced from Fujimoto’s biography: we can see this as Fujimoto closing the door on the traditional artistic path he might have gone down instead, realizing that at this point it may well be forever lost to him.

Of course, this reading of the comic can radically alter how one interprets that final montage. It’s one thing to be creating for yourself. It’s a common refrain I hear from many writers and artists I admire that in the end their work is for themselves, and while it’s nice if other people enjoy it that isn’t their primary goal as creators. What does it mean, though, to be inspired by a different side of you? We all have many points in our life where we have diverged from one potential direction, sometimes slightly and sometimes radically. Is there anything we owe to the person we could have been? If we have forsaken the painter for the sake of the sequential artist, are we obligated to the painter we could have been to become the greatest mangaka we could be, so that their “death” may not be in vain?

It’s hard to imagine a larger departure in subject matter from the work that made Fujimoto famous, “Chainsaw Man,” and as such we see a different side of his visual storytelling than we’re used to. There’s a brief scene of action, but it’s a far cry from the gory action-horror his name has been synonymous with for the past few years. The few moments of motion that are central to the storytelling are significantly more subtle: a strip falling to the ground, a private dance in the rain, the marking of pen on paper. Rather than motion Fujimoto’s primary tool for storytelling in this story is tone. Panels go from more conventional manga illustration-style, with line mainly serving to form the outlines of figures and lots of negative space, to blends of different grey screen tones and gradients, to heavy uses of hatching. It isn’t just that Fujimoto varies the value of the lightness and darkness, but the methods he uses to accomplish this vary according to what the storytelling requires. Not only does this heighten the dramatic moments and soften the more sentimental moments, but it simply makes the comic more interesting to the eye.

The other crucial visual technique Fujimoto employs in this one-shot is a heavy use of repeated imagery. This is a storytelling technique that has earned a lot of derision in recent years, particularly among American comic fans. Without naming any names, I imagine most comic fans reading this can think of at least one comic where the choice to repeat a single image, or one with slight variations, over the course of a few panels has come off as “phoned in.” It’s become so commonplace — and arguably abused — that it can sometimes be easy to forget sometimes that in a sequential medium the repeated image can have a meaningful storytelling effect. Fujimoto is here to remind us of its power. Most of the time it is employed it is to evoke the passage of time, particularly in connection with Fujino’s time spent at her desk working. The passage of time is tracked in the conventional ways one would expect — we see the calendar change, and we see the weather outdoors change. For many artists this would be enough, but this is a fraction of the work Fujimoto does on each panel. Despite so many panels showing the exact same room, there are minor variations from panel to panel. Here’s a stack of papers that wasn’t there before; there are some books that were previously in a different location. It isn’t the superficial details that literally spell out the passage of time that make it effective; it’s the shifting of objects that makes things actually appear lived in. The combination of fixed qualities — the framing of the panel, the perspective, the location of the desk — with changing details are what make the technique all the more striking.

The 27 year-old Fujimoto is quickly becoming a superstar, with “Chainsaw Man” being a massive hit both commercially and critically. “Look Back” shows a completely different side of Fujimoto — so different that I almost don’t want part two of “Chainsaw Man!” There’s still years ahead of us to see what more he has to offer, and if this one-shot can tell us anything about his future, it’s that you’ll never be able to expect what he has coming next — only that you shouldn’t miss it.

Final Verdict: An outstanding one-shot from a rising star of the medium.