WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Chainsaw Man by Tatsuki Fujimoto, available in English from Viz Media.
Adventure Time is a lot of things to a lot of people. The show, created by Pendleton Ward, is arguably the greatest American cartoon of the decade and there are many facets to which it owes its success. Similar to Naruto or Pokémon, the show's audience grew with its characters creating a special connection between reality and fiction for those who began watching it as children and left it in 2017 as college students.
This shift can be seen as the seasons progressed and the narrative successfully combined its particular brand of childish/absurdist humor with the darker more adult themes that ultimately led it to a heart-wrenching conclusion. The Land of Ooo is stupid and ridiculous -- there is a candy kingdom in it, after all -- but it also features its own rich history, lore and occasionally leads its characters and fans down uncomfortable and esoteric philosophical paths. While the show was certainly a breath of fresh air and seemed to usher in a new era for Cartoon Network, at its core it's a simple concept: a boy and his dog.
This is a similarity -- among others -- that the absolutely algebraic story of Finn and Jake shares with one of Shonen Jump's more popular, current manga series. Chainsaw Man, by Tatsuki Fujimoto, is also the story of a boy and his dog. Like Finn and Jake, Denji (the boy) and Pochita (the dog) live in a ramshackle clubhouse of sorts, and also like Finn and Jake, said clubhouse sits smack-dab in the middle of a magical world.
Now, there are some important differences to note between the two stories. While both sets of best buds live in clubhouses, the clubhouse owned by Pochita and Denji is decidedly smaller. If we're being honest it's more of a shed than a clubhouse that basically just keeps the rain off of them. Again, both go on adventures and battle monsters but in the case of Denji and Pochita this is less by choice than and more under the threat of physical violence and ultimately death at the hands of the Yakuza, to whom Denji owes an arbitrarily large debt which he inherited from his father who, under the burden of said debt, hung himself.
He's assisted by Pochita, who like Jake, is a magical dog of sorts. Pochita is actually a dog-shaped devil. Where Jake can make good sandwiches, joke around, and morph his body in useful and hilarious ways, Pochita has a chain saw for a nose that Denji uses to butcher other devils of all shapes and sizes. This list includes a tomato devil, which is kind of like the anthropomorphic foods in Ward's show except here, the tomato devil gets brutally dismembered with a chainsaw blade.
To say that the world of Chainsaw Man is darker than Adventure Time (even taking into account the nuclear holocaust which brought about The Land of Ooo) would be a pretty serious understatement. In his introductory scene, Denji notes that he has had to stoop to cutting off and selling a few of his own body parts in order to make money. He has sold his kidney, one of his eyes and even one of his testicles. Logically, he only gets rid of those body parts for which he has a backup; he's desperate but not stupid. The same chapter sees him musing about the luxury that is putting something such as butter or jam on bread and resorts to eating a lit cigarette for one-hundred yen. But, like any good shonen protagonist, he has a dream. Denji's dream is two-fold; first, he wants to eat bread with something on it, and second, he wants to hug a girl. Once he has achieved those two things, he's ready to die.
By Chapter Two, the famously close bond between man and man's best friend is taken to a body horror extreme. Denji discovers that the Yakuza clan to which he is indebted and functionally enslaved have themselves been enslaved by a zombie devil (the devils seem to come in any variety imaginable) who sends his gang of Yakuza zombies to kill Denji because he's a devil hunter and therefore the natural enemy of all devils.
In most Shonen series, Denji would narrowly defeat the zombie horde, or be rescued at the last minute by someone who would begrudgingly become his teacher, but not here. Denji is killed and cut apart by the zombies. Afterward, we see his severed head and limbs left in a dumpster along with Pochita.
But all is not lost, apparently, because Pochita is able to bring Denji back from the dead. There's just one caveat: in order to do so, the devil must become Denji's new heart. The formerly dead boy now rises from the dumpster, a human-devil hybrid. From the center of his chest the ripcord which was Pochita's tail sprouts. He uses his new ability to slaughter the Yakuza. As he is panting in the pile of gore, a group of government devil hunters discover him and take him on as one of their own. Of course, as a he is part-devil if he ever steps out of line, or disobeys an order he will be put down as such.
Adventure Time and Chainsaw Man are completely in opposition to each other in terms of story direction, tone, art style and character, and yet they can be boiled down to the same core concept. In both cases, the story is of two friends trying to make it in a world much larger and more complicated than they are, and yet those worlds and those friends couldn't be more different from each other. Chainsaw Man replaces Adventure Time's whimsy with gloom; its friendship with possession and control and its hilarity with twisted body horror. The stories are different but function like inverse reflections of one another. If anything, this is an argument for the strength and flexibility of the Boy and his Dog archetype.
If you like Adventure Time and/or extremely gory violence, you may need to check out this insane manga as it continues its blood-drenched upward climb through the Shonen Jump rankings.