Manga Review: Chainsaw Man Chapter 79

Chainsaw Man Chapter 79

VIZ

Mangaka: Tatsuki Fujimoto

Well… It happened. If you’ve been reading the series up until now, then you know in the last chapter Aki became the Gun Fiend and Denji was forced to fight against his former comrade. And if you’ve been reading the series up until now, you also know that when difficult situations arise in Chainsaw Man, the solutions are often just as difficult. This review will be spoiler-free as always, but if you’ve been reading the series up until now, you know what happened.

I’m not going to delve into the story points too much because I think it’s best that you see those for yourself, but it’s very clear that this chapter should and will have ramifications for the rest of the series going forward. I will also say that Fujimoto’s use of the snowball scene as a parallel to the actual violence is used to great effect again in this chapter.

With the outcome of chapter 79 and what we have come to learn about Makima, I want to see Denji grow more as a character. In the beginning, it was fun to love the simple-minded and not-particularly-benevolent Denji who enjoyed the literal bare minimum pleasures in life and was motivated by lust more than anything. However, slowly but surely he began to find himself feeling connected to more and more people beyond base urges and survival. I want this chapter to affect Denji in a way that makes him change. This chapter needs to have an impact on the characters so it wasn’t in vain.

I will also say that this chapter had some of the best art in the series. As I’ve said before, I think Fujimoto’s art style works well for action, so those scenes were really brought to life and increased the tension of the situation. But I found even the few panels of just human characters or still movement (which I think usually look the worst) weren’t too bad in this chapter. I’ve always thought that Fujimoto’s devil designs were really interesting, but here even the panels with all human characters looked good. This chapter also had one of my favorite panels in the entire series toward the end.

I’m not sure how much longer Chainsaw Man will run in Shonen Jump; on one hand, it feels like we’re heading towards a finish line in the story but on the other, it feels like there’s still a lot the story has to resolve. For now, we’ll just have to wait until the next chapter to see what will become of our characters after this.

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