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, Ken checks in with “The Hunters Guild: Red Hood.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
The Hunters Guild: Red Hood Ch. 9
Written & Illustrated by Yuki Kawaguchi
Reviewed by Ken Godberson III
So, when I’m in the rotation for This Week in Shonen Jump I tend to take on series that are within their infancy period. The series that are just beginning in the pages of the book at their rawest components. I like to look at them to see I believe they have the potential to be something in the long run. And while most of the series I review aren’t probably going to be the Next Big Thing per se, I tend to at least find something that has a great deal of potential with the right nurturing.
So I beg you to bear with me when I say that I find “The Hunters Guild: Red Hood” to be very, very boring.
Like, even taking a look at the tagline on Viz’s english website: “A grim tale on Grimm tales, the hunted become the hunters!” just doesn’t feel like a series brimming with originality will ensue. This chapter did not help much: it essentially being the start of a test for the hunter candidates. It’s a game of cops and robbers (they literally explain it like that). However, they quickly deduce there’s actually a twist to how this test is supposed to be passed and that is revealed in this chapter but it’s not anything anyone that hasn’t read a series like this couldn’t have figured in a minute. And that’s just it, even with some revelations we’ve had recently, it still doesn’t feel like it elevates this series.
Onto the artwork, I think Kawaguchi’s work is pretty decent but it’s also not so good that I would recommend this book on that alone. It has some functional visual pacing during the action scenes that don’t feel disjointed. However, it might just be me, but I think a couple of the pages in this chapter were a bit rushed. Like they still look a bit sketchy and incomplete. All in all, it’s artwork that is not going to be stuff to write home about.
Like I said at the top of the review, when I go into this very new series, I try to find something to latch onto. Something that can provide a spark for me. However, “The Hunters Guild: Red Hood” has not been providing that, whether narratively or artistically. I don’t want to immediately predict doom for this title, but I feel like unless something happens to really garner attention, it’s either going to be hovering around that chopping level or will be gone altogether.
Final Verdict: 4.8- I’m sorry. It’s just really boring.
