Welcome back to the VIZ pubwatch! It’s a new year, and after taking December off for real life reasons, I am once again bringing you the VIZ news and reviews you deserve! This month we’re talking once again about Tatsuki Fujimoto (my beloved) as well as the final volume of BEASTARS and volume 2 of Romantic Killer. But first, some news!
Zom 100 Anime Announced
The anime adaptation of shonen series Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead is going to stream on Hulu in the US starting in July 2023. Get a first look at the trailer here! Going to be honest, I’d been avoiding this series for a while because I’m not that into zombie stories, but the trailer made me reconsider. It seems pretty fun! Hopefully the show is good. Speaking of anime…
Winter Anime Season Begins
The seasonal anime cycle continues to swirl. As Chainsaw Man’s anime adaptation ends (with some absolutely beautiful animation and several of the best opening/ending sequences of the year), fellow Shonen Jump series Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible and Me and Roboco’s anime adaptation begin. And of course, My Hero Academia and Boruto are continuing (because when are they not), as well as Golden Kamuy’s fourth season. So much anime, so little time. The Crunchyroll Anime Awards are also happening again this year, but for some reason every series nominated aired within the first half of the year, which is a little strange considering how popular certain summer and fall series were. But if you want to vote for Spy x Family in every category, the link is here.
One Piece Color Art Compendium: New World to Wano Released
A weekly serial that’s been running for over 25 years accumulates a whole lot of color pages to show for it. This third installment of this color page collection has all of the color pages through the Paramount War to the New World arc, along with author commentary and special interviews. One Piece fans wouldn’t want to miss this!
I still have not read One Piece. So instead, let’s talk about…
What I’m Reading
Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man: 17–21
Tatsuki Fujimoto
January 17, 2023
This is a collection of Fujimoto’s early one-shots, before his first series, Fire Punch, launched, and before he made his name with the wildly successful and much beloved Chainsaw Man. The art in these early stories is clearly rougher than his more recent work, but it’s fascinating to see that a lot of the themes that preoccupy his later stuff were already showing up when he was still in college. It’s also fascinating to see Fujimoto’s commentary on his own work. He points out, in the comments to the story “Love is Blind” about a guy so focused on trying to confess to his crush he ignores an alien invasion, that he “always takes 31 pages to do what could be done in 16.” All of the one-shots are preoccupied with the connections between people, or nonhumans pretending to be people, or nonhumans calmly admitting to not being people, balancing grounded humor and interactions with fantastical situations. Fujimoto’s storytelling and draftsmanship visibly improve with each comic, and it’s easy to see the progression from these short stories to the longer series (and more recent one-shots like Look Back) he’s doing now.
Romantic Killer, Volume 2
Wataru Momose
January 3, 2023
Anzu’s back, and this time she has… a long-lost childhood friend love interest?! Who’s the extremely handsome and popular rising star of the baseball team?! And if that wasn’t enough, some rich prince-type tsundere short king suddenly shows up in front of her house demanding she go on a date with him! This volume is very eventful and very funny, and so far all of Anzu’s love interests have managed to be extremely likeable. Even the tsundere prince Koganei is shown to be serious and hardworking when he takes a job at the convenience store where Anzu works. The bright colors serve the irreverent, silly story well, and the small moments of genuine emotional connection between Anzu and her love interests feel earned. I watched the anime adaptation on Netflix first, but both versions of the story seemed like equally competent shojo romantic comedy to me.
BEASTARS, Volume 22
Paru Itagaki
January 17, 2023
It’s the end of an era, again. I haven’t covered BEASTARS here in a while, but I have kept up with it. This final volume wraps up everyone’s stories: Legoshi, Haru, Louis, Juno, Melon, Yahya, etcetera, etcetera. The fate of the black market is dramatically decided, Legoshi and Haru decide what they want to do with their relationship going forward, Melon faces justice, everything is tied up satisfyingly in a way that makes the BEASTARS saga feel complete. I liked the slight jump forward that showed what happened to the world after the whole black market situation, and how Louis decides to make his political arranged marriage work for him. We also get to see a flashback of Gosha and Toki’s relationship and how in love they were, and how terrified Gosha was of accidentally hurting her with his deadly Komodo dragon venom.
BEASTARS just really… works. It’s a weird story with a weird little premise that isn’t deliberately allegorical, which is why the herbivore/carnivore conflicts can be used to talk about a lot of different kinds of structural and societal oppression. The struggles Legoshi and Haru face in their relationship aren’t a one-to-one correspondence to human interracial or cross-cultural relationships, but there’s similarities, and there’s similarities in how Louis’s attraction to carnivores overlaps with the queer subtext in his friendships with Legoshi and the Shishigumi, and there’s just so many layers to everything in this comic I’m always thinking about it on some level or another. I hope Itagaki comes back to this world again someday.
That’s all I’ve got for you this month! Tune in next month for more VIZ news and reviews!
