#jump comics

DRAGON QUEST IV: PROLOGUES OF THE CHOSEN

The prologues of each chapter in DRAGON QUEST IV, presented in manga format, now in English!

(Please read from right to left. Enjoy.)

. .

.

.

.

.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

A boy named Denji is alone in the world but for his pet chainsaw devil Pochita, spending every day eating moldy bread and wishing for toppings, killing devils for the mob because his dad left him in debt. But one day, when he is sacrificed to zombies, his life is turned around when Pochita gives him a new heart, and he is recruited by Makima to kill devils for her. But there's more to devils than meets the eye, and Makima has a habit of exerting control over those around here...

Chainsaw Man is a story that I would call "consistently weird, inconsistently good, often profound". It's a shounen series with a lit of grit and grime under its fingers, and the manga was a wild discovery for me and for the anime/manga community. Its anime adaptation is still going strong and people seem to be loving it, and there's a lot left to adapt in the first part that I think will secure its legacy.

The second part is where things get really bizarre. Spoilers below, but ultimately I think you should just read the first part unless you want to be sad.

So after Makima dies in the first part and is reborn as Nayuta, Denji has to take care of her as an older brother, and spends his days as a psuedo superhero killing devils. But cults still want him, and the stronger devils are seeking him out for their own ends. Asa is also someone he meets along the way, someone who has a terrible time at school (in my mind, due to the autism) and makes a contract with the War Devil.

Part 2 was really weird. A lot of it is just repercussions from Denji's horrible time with the devil-killing association, and trying to become some semblance of a person when deep down, he's still a sad, horny teenager. Lots of things just kept getting worse and worse for him until, by the end, he's a shattered shell of his former self, and he no longer believes he can have a good life. Even Asa, who is supposed to kill him, can't bring herself to do so because he's just in such a sad state.

And then Pochita eats his own heart, erases himself from existence, and Denji is thrust back into his old life as a devil hunter, his dearest friend Power coming back to life. The end.

The story really felt like it was going someplace with Denji's suffering, like once you hit rock bottom you would have to build yourself up again. In hindsight, it seems a lot of the themes of the story were about how Denji's life could get worse in free-fall, and erasing the thing that keeps ruining his life is the way to go, hence Pochita's sacrifice. The ultimate worst-case scenario for Denji is not something Pochita could allow, and so he got in the way of it. But it's not as natural a fit to the story.

(I had thought it was going to be a thoughtless ending, since Pochita is gone and the concepts he erased would come back, but the ending implies the things he ate are still gone, so it's not like that evil star that breaks children's minds will come back.)

This is a new one for me. I've read bad stories, good stories that fell off, and series that lost their way into new themes. But to have a story kill itself so completely over two chapters was nothing like I've ever seen before; I'll go to bat for the endings of My Hero Academia or Jujutsu Kaisen, but this is such a betrayal of the story being told that I can't really recommend it to anyone. I would have followed the story through to its conclusion, but when a conclusion is so utterly thoughtless it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

fan re-colour of the cover of volume 36