By now, the conceits of many a shonen manga/anime series that should sound too strange to be true are just par for the course. A race of alien warriors who can turn into King Kong by way of a temper tantrum? Sure. A rubberized pirate captain cursed to sink in water? Cool, cool. Wait, teenagers that receive their formative education from a school that teaches them nothing except for the rules of a children's card game based on ancient Egyptian magic? Get your game on! You get the idea: it takes a lot for seasoned readers of manga magazines like Weekly Shonen Jump to be weirded out by much, and yet, the world-famous publication has been doing its best recently to do just that.Take Chainsaw Man, for instance, one of Jump's rising stars. In Tatsuki Fujimoto's series, Denji, a young, orphaned boy with nothing in the world but the clothes on his back and a devil dog by his side, becomes the victim of a gruesome, devil mafia massacre, only to be given life beyond death by his supernatural companion. Denji's second shot at life sets him on a zero-to-hero path among a motley crew of other devil hunters, with the mysterious Gun Devil sitting at the very top of their hit list. Aside from a strong, socio-political underpinning in its tackling of classism and superheroics, this narrative structure is a fairly standard one for its genre. The unholy fusion of boy and chainsaw, however, is just one of many arresting visuals that automatically sets Fujimoto's series apart from most of the magazine's other titles in the weirdness stakes.In fact, Chainsaw Man is fast gathering a reputation among manga fans for precisely that.
But yes, we hear you One Piece fans with your snail phones, four-elbowed humans and island of really, really long things. When discussing what makes a Shonen Jump series truly strange, it's hard to top Eiichiro Oda's ever-popular, seafaring epic. However, there's an important distinction to be made between these various camps of bizarreness: One Piece is silly; Chainsaw Man is surreal, even abstract at times. So, what about... wacky?
Enter Undead Unluck, an even newer addition to Jump's lineup that features the barely functional tag-team of an undead man and a really unlucky woman. The former, Undead Andy, is essentially manga's answer to Deadpool -- virtually indestructible, essentially immortal and really good with a katana. The latter, Unluck Fuuko, is -- to stick with the Marvel analogy -- closer to Black Cat or Scarlet Witch, except that her probability manipulation is based on physical contact. Like some kind of cruel, fate-laced chastity belt, the more intimate or extensive the contact, the more severe the punishment will be on whoever is on the receiving end. A peck on the cheek has, for instance, has proven to be potent enough to crush an entire building under a meteorite.
Again, Undead Unluck's setup isn't too out of the ordinary for most regular manga readers, as well as those with even a base level of familiarity with American superheroes. But like Chainsaw Man, what pushes Yoshifumi Tozuka's series into the realms of the truly uncanny is the way its story is told. Undead Andy's semi-sentient limbs, for instance, bring the morbid shenanigans of an Itchy & Scratchy segment in The Simpsons to mind. Altogether, the sprinting pace of the writing, frenetic action and cartoon gore make Undead Unluck a madcap reading experience.
But we can do better than this. What about a series that's just through-and-through weird, from premise to execution? Look no further than Mashle: Magic and Muscle and Moriking, two of the magazine's newest acquisitions that are jointly sprinkling real WTF spiciness over the pages of Jump. Mashle, the older of the two, is a straight-up Harry Potter parody that pulls absolutely no punches. Neither does its titular hero, who is abnormally non-magical in a world dominated by witches and wizards, but makes up for this with washboard abs you can bounce a wingardium leviosa off of. (That's not creative license, by the way -- Mashle's body quite literally deflects magic.)
Hajime Komoto's manga, both in its subversive nature and amateur art style, inevitably begs comparison to ONE's original, One-Punch Man webcomic, though it's worth pointing out that Komoto's drawing gets better and better with each new chapter -- much like Hajime Isayama's steady improvement during Attack on Titan's run. Still, for both Potterheads and Potter naysayers alike, Mashle ruining the integrity of Quidditch games by just treading air really fast is funny no matter how well it's drawn.
Speaking of impressive young men, for those weirdos who love Pokémon's Bug-type and handsome forest-dwellers, Moriking has you covered. Tomohiro Hasegawa's manga begins with elementary student, Shoto Aikawa pursuing his insect-collecting passion with the capture of a rhinoceros beetle, and ends up satisfying his older sister's own desires when the beetle transforms into a naked, hot guy who claims to be the "King of the Forest," or Moriking. So far, so "Me Tarzan, you Jane." Things take an even stranger turn when Moriking agrees to enter a bug wrestling tournament for Shoto in the first chapter, which the "chosen King of Insects" easily wins because one, no self-respecting beetle would dare tussle with royalty, and two -- and more importantly -- he's a full-grown man. That's wacky with a capital "W."
The prospective shelf life of some of these series is impossible to predict but, even if they end up being flashes in the pan, it's great to see Jump's editors taking a chance on the increasingly weird than play it safe with the forgettably familiar. As Oda himself says, sometimes it's better to read something "bad" and original than something "good" that's been done before.