I never got around to reviewing the Jujutsu Kaisen anime a few years ago. But unlike shows I actually reviewed for KGUN two or three years ago, the tale of Yuji Itadori battling curses and fellow Jujutsu sorcerers alongside his friends Nobara and Megumi has stuck with me.
It's not an overall favorite of mine but it ranks highly in shonen for me. So when opportunity struck and the entire manga series was being sold used at a local bookshop, I snatched it up and have devoured the 19 volumes across the past month or so.
The manga has story and art by Gege Akutami, a one-man band striking gold in the competitive shonen manga market. Part of that is the simple story with relatable characters. Yuji Itadori is a teenager thrust into danger after consuming a cursed finger belonging to the evil entity Sukuna. To contain this most powerful of curses, Yuji is taken into custody by Jujutsu sorcerers who make him a member of their freshman class at Jujutsu High School. Here he finds a generational political war between new-school and old-school sorcerers while powerful curses are banding together to wipe out humanity and assert themselves as the true humans.
As is the case with most shonen, the series is relentless with its action and overly-complicated with its super powers. The plot is there as a glue holding together the gauntlet of battles and allowing for as many cool characters as possible.
I had a hard time getting into the manga to start. The biggest hurdle to getting into the manga for Jujutsu Kaisen is the awful pacing. The anime does a good job of taking the story and making it feel a little more organic. In the manga, things just kind of happen. Before we know our main characters too well they are immediately thrust into an inter-school competition where they face off against the sorcerer students at Kyoto's Jujutsu High.
And then we get to meet a slew of new characters.
For comparison I'm going to point to Chainsaw Man. As I said in my review of the manga, it is paced so well. It's breakneck but at the same time has a natural progression to events as well as moments of levity and mundanity that build the characters and act as a counterpoint to the gruesome fates and actions awaiting our heroes. Jujutsu Kaisen doesn't do a particularly good job of organically reaching the next big plot point.
The tournament arc is a staple of shonen but it's earned a lot further into the story. In the anime it works because the tournament is in the latter half after we've spent 300-plus minutes with these characters. In a comic book format, you have to be more intentional with the pacing because it is being read at different paces. So someone who rushes needs to still get the same short lulls those who read slower will get as longer sighs. I hate to use Naruto as an example (though ten-year-old Sean is delighted) but it spent a lot of time building up our main heroes and their teachers before we get to the tournament arc, meeting a dozen other characters we will see through the entirety of the series' run.
What I'm getting at is the tournament exists not just as a reason for action, but for introducing more characters who will play major roles in the series to come (Dragon Ball). Going for it so early dilutes the characters and forces the author to work harder after to make me care about the characters.
I say this because Jujutsu Kaisen does something very commendable in a fifty-plus chapter arc called the Shibuya Incident. It is an arc unlike anything I have seen in a popular shonen series and in many ways makes this manga one of my favorite shonen of the 2010's. Without spoiling anything specific — in this arc the villains kill a lot of characters. This is not even ten volumes into the series and Gege Akutami is erasing his characters with reckless abandon. Nobody is safe.
Part of my complaint with the early series and its characterization stems from how hardcore the Shibuya Incident is and how much more effective it would have been had I cared more about these characters. It was still a shocking, well-paced, and frankly fantastic bit of manga. But part of me feels like it came too soon.
On the flip side of that coin, it works in the favor of Akutami. Because no other mangaka of a long-running series like this would put such a massacre so early.
Following this arc, the manga has taken a dip in story-telling quality, introducing a bizarre "culling game" that is a Battle Royale/Hunger Games scenario that comes out of nowhere, has over-complicated rules, and is introducing even more characters who I can only assume won't get the time necessary for me to invest myself in them. Maki at this point is the only main character I have some connection to and much of that comes down to the fact she's so darn cool. In fact, the characters I love the most boil down to being the ones I find the coolest in the action department rather than the ones I have grown attached to through storytelling.
My other big gripe with this manga is the art.
Akutami is a good artist with interesting character designs. But he sits in the same boat as Naruto for me where I never look at pages of Jujutsu Kaisen and think "Dang, I'd love a poster of that splash panel."
The action especially is hard to follow, panels feel like stiff progressions at many points rather than flowing organically. Add to that over-complex descriptions of all the sorcery of battling curses that tend to come in filler panels that only feature words rather than art. It's a way for an author of a weekly series to focus on art in other key areas while filling space but there is so much of these dialogue-only panels in Jujutsu Kaisen they get distracting. I also feel that if you can't explain a character's power without multiple pages of often boring and confusing exposition, then maybe try something else.
This leads to the ultimate question: Would I recommend reading Jujutsu Kaisen?
And that answer is: Yes.
Jujutsu Kaisen has really cool characters, one of the strongest arcs in a shonen series, and isn't afraid to go to dark places that remind me why I love anime and manga so much. It's easy to dismiss this medium as children's cartoons and comics. But they offer something more that comparable American cartoons aimed at teens can't touch. There are genuine emotions, violence and consequences that assume the reader understands the world isn't all flowers and smiles, and that weirdness that can only be described as inherently manga. All my problems with the manga pale when I think about just how entertained I was reading it. In reviewing entertainment I feel like the concept of "entertain" is muddied in a herculean effort to prove the critic is smarter than everyone else because he or she can micro-analyze and base scoring and their entire character as a critic on how much smarter they are than the riff-raff plebians.
But if something is as entertaining as Jujutsu Kaisen and it lives rent-free in my head weeks after concluding the latest volume, then who am I to say it's not doing its job regardless of any of my issues? Because dang it, Jujutsu Kaisen is a good time.
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Sean Newgent has been with KGUN9 since January of 2020 and is Good Morning Tucson's executive producer. He graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in broadcast journalism. He is a critic and cultural commentator. Share your story ideas and important issues with Sean by emailing sean.newgent@kgun9.com.
