Welcome to This Week in Shonen Jump, in which a rotating duo of Multiversity staffers take a look at two stories contained in each installment of Viz Media’s Weekly Shonen Jump. For the uninitiated, Weekly Shonen Jump is an anthology that delivers more than 200 pages of manga of all varieties. We hope that you’ll join us in exploring the world of Weekly Shonen Jump each week. If you are unfamiliar, you can read sample chapters and subscribe at Viz.com.
This week, Matt and Rowan check in with “Blue Exorcist” and “The Promised Neverland.” If you have any thoughts on these titles, or “My Hero Academia,” “Seraph at the End,” “Black Clover,” “Dr. Stone,” “We Never Learn,” or “Food Wars,” let us know in the comments!
Blue Exorcist Chapter 103
Written and Illustrated by Kazue Kato
Reviewed by Rowan Grover
In the latest “Blue Exorcist”, Kazue Kato sticks us in the middle of a flashback/time travel arc to explore some of the series’ elder characters. I love that the generally more paternal and protective Father Fujimoto is presented as something of a renegade here, as it shows readers that there is a lot we don’t know about this character and a significant paradigm shift for their personality and mannerisms. I love how Kato dramatizes the flashy stuff like Fujimoto getting his glasses from his mentor, with a one-liner straight from Hollywood saying “WELL THEN… I GUESS I’LL TAKE THESE AS MY GIFT”, showing his initially shallow nature. Kato cleverly cuts that by introducing Rin’s mother Yuri as the underestimated wildcard exorcist of her era. It’s telling that we see Fujimoto dismissive of her because of her personality and gender, before she not only proves him wrong but calls him out for being a weakling. It cuts him right back to size and gives great character development for both characters.
Structurally, this chapter also works really well. We’re dropped in at a good point in which we can see the high point for a young Fujimoto’s career, at a time when he is riding highest on his pride and confidence. From here, we’re given a good, well-rounded chapter that serves as a solid standalone story about two significant figures in the “Blue Exorcist” universe, and a short character arc about both of them. I love that this isn’t just a flashback, either. Kato actually has Rin using a time portal to serve as a voyeuristic audience watching his mentor and his mother in their youths, and gets to say everything that we’re thinking, especially in the more intimate moments. Pacing is also handled superbly in these moments. In the overall story, the pacing is fairly quick to cover ground, but when Yuri starts to talk about Fujimoto’s past with him, each panel is a separate moment and reaction of Fujimoto, as if he is reliving these moments over and over in the present, and it works really well to convey the emotional weight of what is being experienced.
Kato’s art works great here in terms of showing human emotion, inspired designs and intricate environments for tense action to take place in. There’s a great character personality shift within Fujimoto in the first few pages: Kato goes from drawing him as a brash, young action hero to becoming more cold and aloof. Funnily enough, this change is most signified when Fujimoto gains his glasses from his mentor. Kato draws him frequently from this point with a look of arrogance and boredom: when he flirts with women at bars, it’s with a sleazy, confident smile and when dealing with the Mexican Golem, he stands to the side smoking his cigarette sport a very devil-may-care visage. On that point, the Mexican Golem is visually one of my favorite parts of the chapter. Kato draws him as this Kaiju-esque entity parading through the street with an Aztec design flair. It’s a great hook for readers to latch onto to remember the issue, and Kato does well in creating a formidable and fantastic looking opponent for his heroes.
As with the rest of the series, Kato renders some great, classical European-style environments for his supernatural action to take place in. The cold, grandeur of the church that knights Fujimoto and Yuri is iconic for the series at this point, with Kato using it to show the perspective and scale of the organisation Fujimoto is drawing by having the pillar in the middle of it dwarf the characters beneath it. Kato also draws the Mexico mission environment really well. It’s a little stereotypical Aztec, and doesn’t really serve as an accurate or really individual depiction of the country, but works well within the context of “Blue Exorcist”, being a landscape of giant temples for the Golem to smash around in. There’s also a great final shot of the scene Fujimoto and Yuri share their intimate moment in, where Kato gets to render a lush, botanical area, conveying the more serene nature of their conversation in this scene. Kato does a lot of hard work in this chapter conveying landscapes, and it serves the story well.
Continued belowChapter 103 is a great look into the history of “Blue Exorcist” and some of its key characters. Kato delivers a great, opening story to Yuri and Fujimoto’s arc, with enjoyable action and genuine character development. It’s a great reintroduction to these characters for long time fans and also a potential jumping on point for newer readers.
Final Score: 8.8 – A great start to a flashback/time travel arc, “Blue Exorcist” impresses with great characters and lush environments.
The Promised Neverland Chapter 98
Written by Kaiu Shirai
Illustrated by Posuka Demizu
Reviewed by Matt Lune
“The Promised Neverland” has never been a series afraid to take risks. Whether it’s eschewing the standard tropes of Shonen Manga or embracing its horror influences, Shirai and Demizu’s tense adventure in a world filled with bloodthirsty demons has taken perhaps its biggest risk yet.
For a book that’s just been praised for casting aside the cliches of its format, the nearly two-year time jump in chapter 102 is a classic Shonen trope and one that’s been employed in “The Promised Neverland” before too, but not to such an extreme as this. At the end of the last chapter, main character Emma reminded us that they have a strict time limit in which to free the residents of the various nurseries as well as bring down the demonic overlords that are rearing human children for food. Jumping so far forward at this point in the story, therefore, definitely ratchets up the tension, but has also skipped over a lot of story potential.
It’s appropriate that this latest chapter of “The Promised Neverland” is the featured story in this week’s “Weekly Shonen Jump,” seeing as it’s such a significant moment for the series. As is fairly standard with time jumps, we’re teased and fed information about what we’ve missed in the past, but we don’t spend much time in flashback before we’re back in the present which, if anything, is a mixture of powerfully optimistic and hopelessly bleak. The majority of the chapter is set in a medieval-esque demon town, complete with a bustling marketplace and dozens of demon townspeople. The difference with this marketplace is that it’s filled with a ghastly array of human meat.
Jars of different sizes filled with various body parts, backbones hanging from string over the canopies of friendly market stalls, dried organs on display in baskets on the side of the public walkways, it’s a grim realization that Emma and her gang of escapees haven’t changed anything about their world, and the mixture of macabre and mundane in this demon town makes the salvation of humanity seem even further away. It’s in Demizu’s portrayal of the heroes, however, in which we find the optimism and hope.
The year and a half we’ve missed out on has been filled, we’re told, with laborious and methodical searching of the surrounding area for the land seen in Emma’s vision, the Temple with the golden water that will lead them closer to the status-quo shift their species needs. When we finally see Emma, Ray and the others, it’s revealed that we’ve actually been watching them throughout the chapter, in disguise behind enemy lines within the demon marketplace. The unveiling of these older versions of the characters we’ve gotten used to is so successful thanks to Demizu’s art. Emma has lost that twee, wide-eyed look that used to be at odds with the hardened interior, but instead she’s got a world-weary edge to her looks in which we really feel the time difference.
It’s the same with all the characters, who are all given a re-introduction of sorts at the tail end of the chapter. Demizu has always managed to portray a wide range of ages within “The Promised Neverland,” but here that skill is elevated to the next level. By illustrating the passage of time so well, we get a greater sense of the impact that this world has had upon the children of Gracie Fields, and we can really see the childhood that they’ve been deprived of within their aged faces. Demizu also gets the opportunity to flex their skills by depicting the twisted, weirdly angular demons once again, and within their most unnatural of natural habitats to boot.
By employing such a drastic time-jump, “The Promised Neverland” is able to take a number of narrative shortcuts. Not only can it move the discovery of the Temple closer without sacrificing the cost it took to find it, but it can ratchet up the tension by moving the characters and the reader that much nearer to the literal deadline facing their actions. It’s not without its risks, however, and while a lot of those risks – not seeing the progression of the characters, for example – is mitigated by Demizu’s expressive art, you can’t help but wonder what adventures we’ve missed out on, and what world we now find ourselves in. The more we see of this world, the more we’ll know if this time-jump worked, therefore when it comes to the success of this experiment, it seems that only time will tell.
Final Verdict: 7.8 – A major leap forward in time changes everything yet again, but at what cost?
