If you call yourself an anime and manga fan, you almost definitely know Chainsaw Man already. How can you not! While it isn’t selling as much as its contemporaries like Jujutsu Kaisen and My Hero Academia, it’s still an incredibly popular series, with a passionate fandom that’s created countless bits of fanart, cosplays, and more. Now, as announced this week, creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back is also getting an anime adaptation, based on the 2021 one-shot of the same name – and I can’t see a better excuse to look past the beast that is Chainsaw Man to check out some of the other manga artist’s excellent one-shots.
Like most manga artists, Fujimoto didn’t just start off with a hit like Chainsaw Man. He actually had another serialisation prior to Chainsaw Man called Fire Punch, though for today let’s stick to just the one-shots (not least because Fire Punch is… a lot). Fujimoto’s earlier works were actually categorised into a couple of volumes called Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man, respectively titled 17-21, and 22-26, the numbers representing the age he was at the different points he wrote the collected one-shots.
I think it’s always a bit of a treat to get to see the earlier, rougher, less thought out works of an artist that at this point in time has quite highly revered. The thing about Chainsaw Man is that yes, it can be dark, but it’s also caring and empathetic towards its characters. Fujimoto’s earlier work isn’t always so nice, even sometimes teetering on the brink of being overly-edgy. I can’t always blame him for that, the first story in the first collection was from when he was 17, and I don’t expect young people to be paragons of morality.
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