Great hook to the story. Manga writers are sometimes really good at making you feel the pressures on the protagonist and this chapter is a great example of that. The main character, Nomamato, is a 17-year old girl who can't make enough money to eat while recently landed aliens are enjoying prosperity and what seems to be an enforced privilege in society.
Nomamoto meets a guy named Kitami who dislikes aliens even more than her. Long story short, he ends up killing an alien and she gets the bright idea to eat it, since apparently they taste like squid. The speed of the conflict might be a problem. It definitely gets your attention, but the manga could be in danger of running out of road in the future because it used up its ideas too quickly.
I love the 90% realism art style on the cover. It works really well for Chainsaw Man. Just a fantastic style. The art in the manga itself is more stylized, but still good. Nomamoto is pretty cute and very crazy.
Obviously this isn't a traditional heroic story, but that doesn't hurt its potential at all. Chainsaw Man and JJK are the biggest hits in the last 5 years and one of them is a massive antihero story while the other isn't far behind. JJK is a really interesting failure at the end of the day, but Chainsaw Man is still going strong. I don't believe at all that this is going to "flip on the chuds" as I saw some people posting - I'm sure the aliens aren't completely villainous but if there is indeed more than meets the eye to the story about the aliens saving the Earth from an asteroid, then they are definitely not going to be revealed as "the good guys all along." Also alien life is framed too cavalier for this to be the case.
Nomamoto and Kitami aren't heroes, and might not even be antiheroes, but the one thing that's established is they have legitimate grievances (unless he was lying or deluded about an alien killing his family, which I doubt). Maybe the story will be a Heart of Darkness-style descent into madness, but their grievances will always be there.
Their system is kind of close to the pulp story system we had in the West 80 years ago. You gotta deliver an amazing hook to ensnare readers at the newstand to pick up your folio. Cover art, sensational or fantasical headlines and/or loglines. In Japan, you gotta hook a reader to take your story onto the subway, when I would imagine the newstand competition is fierce.
The artists, who are most often the writer, design their characters first, think of a premise and just dive in. Not a lot of long term planning like an experienced or thoughtful writer would do for a serialized story.
I'm not a shipper, but the end of MHA was disappointing to me hehe. The whole 'this is how I became the greatest superhero' with the twist being 'for 10 minutes'. If you're going to do a Flowers for Algernon kinda take back, reduce how long it took Deku to 'get gud' so we get more time with the pinnacle action. Instead we got the worst of both worlds. Long investment in training for a tiny payout, then watch the hero immediately take on the mantle of has-been, here's a pity artifact. It is truly rare where a manga sticks the landing.
It was predictable how things were going to end up for both Deku and Bakago. Not once did Deku ever refer to himself as "The Number One" while Bakago repeatedly aimed for that. In a good way a lot of things were predictable so the reveals were less asspulls and more founded, like with the Decay power having been given by AFO all along, something I certainly started considering when the first flashbacks of Shigaraki's post family massacre released.
Somethings were overdone, though. The "teacher with eye powers finding out one of the big bads is actually his previously thought dead best friend who can teleport" literally mirrored Naruto with Kakashi and Obito. Both Erasurehead and Kakashi fail their class/teams as a team/character building exercise they are that similar in the role.
His sudden use of the last few quirks were also written in too fast. He leaves the school and the next time he's seen not only can he use both the Smokescreen quick and Fa-Jin, but he already knows how to use them well so the timeskip threw a lot away just to get to some future point of the story faster but that just meant more treading water and issues dragging out the same fight over and over and over. AFO died how many times in the last fight? Three or something? First time before Rewind, second time vs Bakago, third time vs Deku and the previous OFA wielders who ended up sacrificing themselves instead of all being taken as the Spidey-Sense one was.
The Anti-Quirk bullets also ended up being far less significant as many thought the number of them remaining would line up with how many extra Quirks Deku had. Nope, they reappear once, involve a quick hack-job [heh], and that's it. Never seen again.
And that's before getting on to how drawn out the fights with Dabi ended up being, how stupid the fight with Uraraka vs Himiko ended up, and one of the biggest traditional endings for Shounen how Deku and Uraraka just never seemed to happen. Whether that last one was because of retarded Fujoshi whining about Deku and Bakago or not it was still a big step away from how Shounen, [aka the comics for boys/men and not the retarded Fujoshi...], usually ended.
Look at Naruto. For years he was pining after Sakura while Hinata was pining for Naruto and Sakura was pining after Sasuke. Sasuke ends up with Sakura, box of insane violence and parent issues that she is, while Naruto ends up with Hinata, a literal princess of sorts of her clan and S T A C K E D by the end of Shippuden. Sakura might have been what/who Naruto was chasing since the start of the manga but not only did he still end up with someone that had actually been around since the start, more or less, but someone who was IMO a far, far better choice, and not just because she could out eat Choji at the ramen restaurant, crush melons with her thighs, offer melons of her own, and knit a great scarf.
Dabi was also a bit redone ala Avatar with Zuko and Azula, the former being the good pyrokinetic with the burn/scar caused by a parent [Todoroki] against the unhinged pyrokinetic sibling who uses blue flames. While MHA had a lot of references throughout several of them were far too recent like the Naruto and Avatar ones to feel like anything other than direct copies.
Yeah I didn't mind the Dabi vs family plot, it was just toooooooo dragged out. He was trying to juggle multiple threads, so they would line up in a climactic way, but it put too many critical moments on pause and too much repetition.
Putting it lightly. Some of the "big reveals came and went so fast they could probably get missed with a physical copy if two pages get stuck together.
"Hey kids look, Stain is back!
Aaand he's dead." 🙄
Did you read chapter 431?
It felt the the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC trying to fix various issues with the original ending that was released.
Regarding MHA, the original magazine-run ending was lackluster, sure, but Horikoshi added an additional chapter in the tankobon release to hopefully end on a better note.
Lol that's what happened? MHA fans take a final L. Sucks to suck I guess.
I'm glad it's finally over. Not like it was offensive or anything but the sheer banality of the story was enraging.