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, Brian checks in with “Protect Me, Shugomaru!.” If you have thoughts on this or any other current Shonen Jump titles, please let us know in the comments!
Protect Me, Shugomaru! Chapter 1
Written and illustrated by Daiki Ihara
Translated by Caleb Cook
Lettered by Sabrina Heep
Reviewed by Brian Salvatore
There’s something very familiar about “Protect Me, Shugomaru!” Familiarity isn’t necessarily a strike against a story, but this first chapter was not just familiar, but also predictable. And, due to its predictability, its charms were mostly lost. There’s almost nothing in this initial chapter that is memorable enough to stand out from the dozens of stories just like it, no matter how pleasantly it is rendered.
The story is simple: Sanagi is from a rich family and is being hunted by a deadly assassin, and so she is provided a bodyguard. Insert a dash of boy crazy, a forgotten past connection to her bodyguard, and an Amelia Bedelia-esque literalism, and you’ve got the totality of “Protect Me, Shugomaru!”
Daiki Ihara draws Shugomaru, the bodyguard, as a thumb of a little boy, with a knotty scarf around his neck and…are those frosted tips? Shugomaru looks more like a doll or a ventriloquist’s dummy than a person and, to be honest, I’ve seen dummies with a better sense of the world than Shugomaru exhibits here.
Ihara really leans into the joke: EVERYTHING CAN KILL YOU! As a reader, that theme is picked up from page 4, but the necessary twist – someone is actually trying to kill you – isn’t revealed until page 22, by which time patience has run thin. The story’s tropes are well executed, but all of them wait too long to happen, giving the reader an impatience that lets up too late.
Even the ‘curveballs,’ like Shugomaru being bad at his job and undersized, are tropes in and of themselves. The ‘revelation’ that Sanagi’s would-be assassin is now the big bad in the first chapter equally lands with a thud. There’s just not enough here that is different enough to draw the reader in. Even the art is very run of the mill; aside from a few panels with interesting use of black coloring representing pain coming from a character’s mouth, there’s nothing in here that even caused me to pause and consider the art for more than a few moments.
There are so few chances taken here that the riskiest part of the book is just how banal it all is. It takes guts to make a story with this little there.
Final Verdict: 4.9 – A perfectly forgettable new story in Shonen Jump.
