marlowe1 | Entries tagged with chainsaw man

111.Chainsaw Man 2 by Tatsuki Fujimoto - I know where this one is going and I know that the main draw is how the dude with the chainsaws coming from his head and hands chops up demons, but the true joy of this book is watching Denji break down barriers and establish relationships with the people around him. He's no longer the loner walking around with his pet demon. He's become friends with Power because she tried to feed him to a bat demon. But she did it to save her cat so it's understandable. And Power wears falsies, which is a funny detail only because she is always drawn like Marilyn Monroe in a suit and horns. I don't remember if that was a plot point of the show but that scene where Denji finally gets to touch a boob is supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable because it's that combination of teenage sexuality (must fuck everyone now) and the emotional parts (Oh wait, I actually want to have the intimacy that sex represents). And at this point, Power is a disaster (and pretty damn gross with the whole not bathing and not flushing personality) but she's also the best friend Denji has (and he's a disaster as well).

I know where this is going so it's even more sweet in its fragility. Also the book ends with them in that hotel where they are trapped on the one floor and one of the demon hunters really wants to feed Denji to the demon that offered to let them go in exchange for letting him eat Denji.

112. Weathering with You by Makoto Shinkai - "I want you more than blue skies" - fucking hell that line always gets to me. This is the light novel adaptation of the movie. I think the movie came first but he was writing the book at the same time he was wroking on the movie and then came the manga? It's all very confusing. I actually didn't know that this was a book when I put it on hold but hey, I like the story and I like Shinkai's romantic nature even if almost all of his stories have a set pattern (Act 1: Funny magic thing, Act 2: Tragic implications, Act 3: fuck that tragedy, we're going to undo them for love). And this one follows the pattern, but no matter how much I want to not get taken, I do have all the feels.

I think I already wrote about this one, but different than Your Name or the new one with the chair, this one has some real problems with the ending as she is supposed to be the weather sacrifice. When she decides not to sacrifice herself (because her boyfriend chases her into the sky and begs her to come back) the rains come and half of Tokyo is underwater by the end.

One caveat to the book instead of the manga. It does give some more insight but not much and it's very confusing as he keeps changing first person perspective without telling you who is speaking.

70. Spy X Family vol 4 by Tatsuya Endo - This is the one where Anya gets the future seeing dog. This is also the one where the underlying angst of the story is revealed as both Twilight and his boss have lines about war, or mostly what war is like with your parents dead and spending years de-humanizing the enemy and then trying to get over the guilt. For a cute book about a cute family, there's some brutal messages being smuggled through. As Anya stumbles into the terrorist plot and rides around on the big future telling dog (and even warns Twilight about the bomb, there's the effort that everyone is making to make sure that Anya grows up with her innocence mostly intact - or at least not with the experience of bombs and dead family, etc. You even learn that Twilight's handler has a dead son.

71. Before Chainsaw Man 17-21 by Tatsuki Fujimoto - I'm not sure why this is called 17-21 unless it's the stuff he wrote between those ages since there are only 4 stories in this one. I guess it's about his age. The four stories are "A Couple Chickens were Still Kicking it in the backyard", "Sasaki Stopped a Bullet", "Love is Blind" and "Shikaku". Most of these stories hit that sweet spot of overlapping sensitivity with freaky shit. The chicken one is about aliens really loving to eat humans so to two people are disguised as chickens, only one is a human-eating alien who was a little sad about eating a human and wanted to know what it was like to be human. Love is Blind is a hilariously drawn story about a guy trying to tell a girl that he loves her as everything around them goes chaotic. Ok, Tatsuki did steal one of the most famous jokes from Hitchhiker's Guide (the one about destroying earth to make a highway) but it's still got a cute ending. Shikaku is an assassin meets a vampire meet cute. Not bad.

72. Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings - I was actually more fascinated by this one that I would have normally been due to the fact that I looked it up and saw that David Eddings went to jail for child abuse 13 years before he wrote it. Like how fucked up do you have to be to actually go to jail for child abuse in 1969 when you are a college professor. Anyhow there was a kind of fascination in viewing the story of our hero being raised by two near immortal beings as a fantasy about what Eddings' life could have been had he not been trained to be a total shit around children - both as a formerly abused child and then an abuser who locked his severely bruised son in the basement. But it got boring. Too much exposition. The whole book is full of the kid getting news from everyone around him except for the parental figures who keep going "We will tell you when you are ready". Oddly enough I didn't get sick of it until the last 20 pages. By the last 20 pages, I was so damn bored with everything about this book that I knew that I wasn't going to go on in the series (I actually read this out of The Belgaariad collection that has the whole series in two volumes. It's on the ebay pile. I'm not reading the rest.)

73.House of Whispers: Power Divided by Nalo Hopkinson & Domo Stanton - I suspect that I will read the first story in the collection a few more times because it's the "Sandman Universe" comic where Neil Gaiman sets the story up that will go through all of the "Sandman Universe" titles where there's a crack in the dreaming and Daniel is gone. Maybe he quit. We'll find out later. Or I could just look it up. I was actually going to say something about how Morpheus was a character insert for the author and how killing off Morpheus was basically Gaiman letting the character and the universe go to someone else. DC finally seems to have seen that promise with several titles including Books of Magic, Hellraiser, Lucifer and this one working in the world of Sandman where everyone must deal with the fallout of no Daniel.

This is actually the first book I've read from Nalo Hopkinson and it's got a ton of voodoo material including the changing Erzulie, a plague loa and alligator people. There's an overarching plot about everyone feeling dead and spreading the feeling as Erzulie and group are thrown into a part of the Dreaming and cut off from Earth. There are also books that escaped the Dreaming library. This is a great start to the House of Whispers chapter in the Sandman World series. The lesbian couple and the kids at the center of the story are really great anchors.

74.Remina by Junji Ito - Junji Ito really doesn't waste much time with exposition in this one. Scientist finds planet coming out of a wormhole and names it after his daughter. So his daughter becomes famous and then agrees to become a celebrity and meets a wealthy sponsor that introduces the fallout shelter that looks like a luxury hotel. Then by page 10 that planet if freaking everyone else by eating Saturn and going right to Earth.

So this has some serious torture porn issues as Remina the teenage girl is followed first by fans and then by everyone on the planet who think that they need to sacrifice her to keep the planet from killing earth. There really are no good people in this one. Remina gets crucified in one scene and sees her dad getting stabbed on the next cross. I'm not sure if Ito knows that crucifixion kills you dead since you spend all your time trying to get breath but then your arms give out and you are suffocated (oh hey, I was raised Xian). The horrible shit that Remina goes through is almost too much but she definitely needs to be able to survive. In the last act, everyone is flying because the Remina planet is licking the Earth and the billionaires have escaped to the surface of Remina where taking off a helmet means that your face explodes. It's so Junji Ito. Not one of his major ones but a fun one.

60.Chainsaw Man vol 1 by Tatsuki Fujimoto - This is the first volume and since I saw the anime first, I'm just going to be impressed by how much they followed the anime. There's Denji getting killed and then his chainsaw hound demon making a deal with him and then his slaughter of the yakuza. There's Power who is animated as the platonic ideal of sexy cosplay. And Denji's overriding ambition is to touch boobs. Weirdly enough this is not as annoying in the comic as it is in the show. But maybe I know where it leads. It all ends with Power leading Denji into a trap because the bat demon has her cat, Meowy. It's adorable. And I'm happy to have read it. Will probably have more to say about future installments.

61. Grendel Omnibus vol 2 by Matt Wagner and many others - So it comes down to this. Biker gangs are now running the show. Also Serbian militias. This is the dystopian future where Grendel Khan's rule has cracked in several places and instead of a global empire, you got a lot of isolated places that are run by self-described Grendels. The fourth volume of the regular series saw cracks in the Grendel empire (after beating the vampire pope in volume 4) but this shows the whole thing fucked up and Grendel in name only. So as an enthusiast for the collapse of Rome, I'm rather happy with it. The main story is about a Grendel biker gang in Indianapolis who run everything and end up in the news. But the leader falls in love with the local nurse who fucking hates them and isn't shy about it. So they end up fucking. And in love. And the nurse's kid gets run out of the Grendels and comes back with a terrorist campaign. The story ends with the nurse shooting her kid and then the leader of the Grendels and herself in the same panel.

I'm read this book at the same time as I'm reading a book about cops infiltrating the Hell's Angels. Fucking brtual and gross. Fuck, I hate bikers.

53. The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre - Adam Worth is one of those legendary master criminals which means he wasn't that successful at it. Still he is the quintessential Victorian criminal, buying his way into a lordship, putting on airs, using his connections to get his friends out of jail. His criminal career began in the Civil War when he was declared dead and promptly signed up for active duty again in order to take the money and run.

A lot of the accounting of the man is through the Pinkertons. It seems like the Pinkertons liked him. Hell, when they were no longer the hero detectives tracking down the mass murderers like Jesse James and were the shitty enforcers of robber barons against their strikers, this guy gave them the respectability by giving up a painting.

Oh. I'm getting ahead of myself. Ok. The story of Adam Worth is the story of a master criminal who was loyal to his associates and riding high for a long time with an American Bar in Paris where all his criminal friends could gather and a Victorian gentleman status that fooled everyone. And then at the height he stole Gainsborough's The Duchess of Devonshire painting. And kept it.

He was going to use it as ransom to get his brother out of jail but he kept it. For twenty years. And the main reason why he gave it up is because he went to jail.

And the main reason he went to jail was because he tried to pull a smash and grab. He got caught.

I don't know. I feel like I'm just recapping this book but it's really good. Ben McIntyre is amazing at telling a story. What makes it even more great is the fact that this guy was the basis for Moriarty who was the basis of Macavity from Cats (I would have brought that up at Convergence panel but an ex-friend accused me of harassment and the Convergence programming people didn't even ask me about it before banning me from all panels for 2 years - long story. I might tell it. Just got word. Hell I don't even know if it's her but I think it's her)

54.Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol 82, No 3, Sept 2014 - So this is one of those peer reviewed journals that I keep grabbing articles from. Most of the articles are very Christian centric. So there's a great deal of material about Orientalism when it comes to Orthodox Church stuff and there's an article on Avigdor Miller that won't stop calling him Ultra-Orthodox (an inaccurate way of describing haredi and chasidic Jews). Some of it is over my head but a lot of it is just so Christian. I guess that is going to be the bias but it's just not for me.

55.Jujutsu Kaisen 1 by Gege Akutami - I want to call this one Chainsaw Man: The Safe Version because it's the same basic concept of Chainsaw Man with a protagonist who is possessed by a demon (or in this case a "curse" of a demon because he ate a finger) and has to fight other demons (ok they are curses) but he's less rough edges and I don't think it ends up in the same sad places that Chainsaw Man goes. The main character isn't poor and he's not horny in an uncomfortable way.

Oh man. Another book that I have trouble talking about. I enjoyed it but I'm comparing it to Chainsaw Man which is unfair since apparently "possessed by a demon to fight other demons" is a common trope.