Chainsaw Man #53-61 (part three)

In the wake of Power's vehicular homicide and the implications of the assassin's reveal, paranoia starts to set in. The shapeshifter is quickly identified as part of a semi-infamous American trio who share the same powerset. Any two other people could potentially be disguised enemies.

That said, I don't think Aki is casting suspicion in the best direction in these couple of panels:

The three behind her could potentially be suss, but in the last minute Power has:

1. Rammed one of the actual assassins with Kobeni's car.

2. Tried to blame Kobeni, until she realized something good came of it, at which point she tried to take credit.

3. Picked up Denji's bleeding, unconscious body, and rambled about how she "avenged" him by hitting him and the bad guy at the same time.

There is no way that any person other than Power would have done all this. Not even someone else pretending to be Power would have been able to do this good of a job.

A little more interestingly, the paranoia also ends up cutting the other way. Oingo and Boingo (Monatta and Zenatta back home in the US, but they're in Japan right now) have been watching this from a nearby alley. Watching Zoingo get ignobly, unceremoniously, accidentally killed - without warning, in the space of a second - after however many successful missions they've completed together, has completely shattered the surviving brothers' worldview.

It only gets worse for them from there, as one of Denji and Power's overbearing escorts suddenly proves himself good at a lot more than just pitching about his charges' table manners. Granted, going by the font size in the first panel below, Oingo wasn't exactly making himself hard to hear for anyone standing just outside of the alleyway he was exiting from at the time.

Said bodyguard also proves to be ruthless, as well as having decent hearing and reflexes. Then again, given how often battles between warlocks basically come down to games of rocket-tag, "win initiative and immediately go for the kill" is basically the only non-suicidal strategy for most. So, the ruthlessness might just come with the territory for anyone besides the lucky minority who have defensive rather than purely offensive powers.

Boingo, meanwhile, ends up being saved by his own nervous breakdown after seeing both his brothers die in as many minutes. Bodyguard-with-good-hearing whose name I didn't catch comes into the alley, sees a man trembling and vomiting in sheer panic, and buys his story when he claims to be a civilian with precarious mental health who just saw two people die messily. I guess that guy's Insight isn't as high as his Perception, but hey, limited skill proficiencies, what can you do.

...

We don't see how he killed Oingo, speaking of which. Lots of blood, so probably not a gunshot. Presumably a devilish power that we either won't learn about until later, or that the author just didn't want to bother defining for this minor, likely temporary, ally character. If he ends up not being minor or temporary, I suppose I'll have to remember his name.

...

While all this is going on, another automotive incident takes place elsewhere in the city. This one is a head-on collision between two cars, and once again a fiend appears to be responsible. Multiple fiends, actually. When the irate human driver tries to get the fiend gang's insurance details, this happens:

So, uh. The Quanxi girlfriend with the partially exposed brain has the power to make people stand around sweating profusely and repeating the word "Halloween" for an unspecified duration. I guess she's, um...the Halloween Devil? The Stupor Devil? The Confusion Devil? The Holiday Devil? No idea. The word "Halloween" seems deliberate, but the power it seems to tie into is...confusing, to say the least.

We see a repetition of this when Quanxi and her girlpile most inconsiderately abandon the scene of the incident and walk off to indulge themselves in the local novelty of conveyer-belt sushi. The waitstaff are Halloween'd in lieu of accepting payment. I think? Maybe they just got Halloween'd randomly for no particular reason, and Quanxi had been planning to pay. Who knows.

In fact, for the rest of these few issues, in between action setpieces and tense character scenes, we periodically cut back to the Quanxicule, and they're always either doing normal tourist stuff or having orgies in their hotel room.

I'm starting to wonder if the "human rights and education" demand was insincere on both ends, and Quanxi was really just scamming Winnie the Pooh into sending her girlfriends and her on an all expenses paid Japanese vacation with zero assassinations attempted.

Boingo's time in Japan, on the other hand, ends up not getting that much better after the deaths of his brothers. Not being sure what the hell he's even supposed to do now, he takes on the form of Kurose, the same agent who Zoingo was impersonating when he got rammed. And, following a note scribbled on the back of an old photo he found in Kurose's coat pocket, he finds his way to a friend of the late Public Security man's apartment, who puts him up for the night.

Emotional torment and existential crises ensue.

The loss of Boingo's own remaining family makes him much more sensitive than he'd normally be to the losses of others. Including the deaths of he and his late brothers' own victims, who just a day ago they'd have cracked cruel jokes about and then never thought of again.

...

Now it's starting to remind me of a completely different JJBA part 3 episode. Probably not intentional on the author's part, but since he'd already brought my mind there I'm still going to hold him responsible.

...

Now, here's where I started getting frustrated with this International Assassins arc. In the first couple issues of this volume, it seemed like we were going to get some serious character development for Denji, Aki, and possibly Angel. They all had their status quo's shaken in some way by the Reze fiasco, and seeing where they built themselves up to from there is something I'm looking forward to.

But, since then, pretty much all the attention has gone to these new characters that I'm really not too invested in, with the leads just reacting to things as they happen and/or walking around being silly.

Boingo's little private hell as he stays over at Kurose's friend's place seems like it's supposed to be a commentary on both Denji and Aki's places in society. Both of them are orphans like Boingo. Both of them have fascimiles of social groups carved out of the state devil-hunter community, barraged with ghostly hints of what more normal family and friend groups just outside of their circle are like. Boingo and his late brothers' belief in their own invincibility ("we survived the Gun Devil, so we can survive anything!") both echoes Denji's naive overconfidence, and contrasts Aki's fatalism (he also survived the Gun Devil, but took the opposite message from it). The folly of choosing a life like this when the option of doing virtually anything else with oneself is called attention to (once again making the reader thing of both Aki who made a similar choice, and Denji who was forced into it). All of the above characters' callousness toward violence (at least, lethal violence directed at humans) is harshly examined.

So, I see what the comic is doing. But at the same time, I just wish it would have Denji and Aki themselves confront these things rather than just commenting on them via these new characters who I've been given little reason to care about.

...

Also, how long is it going to take them to report Kurose dead? They know that the brothers can only impersonate people who's dead bodies they've touched, so there's no way Kurose is still alive.

Granted, even if his family's been notified, there's no reason to assume that this ex-coworker of his would have heard about it just yet.

...

Well, my frustrations with the shift in focus aside, the big event that takes up most of the second half of this volume is the arrival of Santa Clause. Japanese Christmas is weird to begin with, but this one is an outlier even by those standards, and not just because it's the wrong time of year. The ambiguously Soviet-aligned indigenous duo end up sort of having to lay low and wait it out for a bit as Santa's own attack interrupts their own plans for giving Denji the fourth jab.

Those two are having the rival assassins get in their way a lot. Still better luck than the American trio had, and they at least haven't had their presence revealed yet, but doubtlessly frustrating for them nonetheless. Maybe they should take a cue from Quanxi and just not try do their job anymore, lol.

Santa Clause himself turns out to be every bit as much of a terror as foreshadowed. Coming so close on the heels of Reze does sort of diminish the impact of what he does (oh no, another superpowered assassin who kills scores of people trying to get at Denji), but at least his gimmick is very distinct from hers. If anything, he's a bit of a throwback to the Zombie Devil, only with both much more calculated malice and much more surgical precision.

With merely a touch, Santa can turn any living human into a "doll" under his control. Their minds are gone. Personalities dead. The transformation is both instantaneous and completely irreversible. More importantly, it is also contagious. Touch someone who's been dollified, and you get instantly turned as well. Santa has constant telepathic control over all dolls, and recieves sensory feedback from them. His multitasking ability is unknown, but seemingly great.

If that wasn't enough, he can also alter the bodies of his "dolls" at will, causing their limbs to grow into enormous scythelike blades among possibly other mutations. Against humans, he has little need to use this ability. However, devils, fiends, and symbionts like Denji are all immune to dollification, so for them he needs to build up on army of zombified civilians and then bury the enemy in stolen, blade-covered bodies.

So yeah. This guy's a nightmare. And he has exactly the kind of personality that goes best with this type of powerset.

The Public Security Directorate guys are pretty sure that Santa has a ceiling on how many dolls he can have at once, but no one has seen it, so it's got to be at least in the high hundreds. The one weakness of his that they do know about for sure is his limited range; Santa can only keep his telepathic control going within a few hundred meters of his person. So, that's what their countermeasures are all going to hinge on. Countermeasures that include Makima making a quick, sneaky return to town.

Never thought I'd be relieved to see her coming back, holy shit.​

In fact, some dialogue between Makima and her underlings in these scenes suggest that Santa Clause is the entire reason they set this whole thing up with Denji being visible in Tokyo and others being ready to jump out of hiding. If protecting Denji really was the top priority, they'd have moved him into a bunker like it seemed like they were going to. It was only once they found out who Germany was sending their way that they decided to turn him into bait instead. Keep him in Tokyo, surrounded by civilians, too tempting a target for Santa to pass up. The Germans probably don't know that the Japanese do know about Santa's range limit, so the trap isn't obvious. In the eyes of Makima and/or her superiors in the Japanese government, removing Santa Clause from the gameboard is worth the risk of losing Denji, a bunch of other Public Security devil-hunters, and a few thousand civilians.

There's also these little details that Makima and Co dangle in front of the reader:

First, while they seem to be willing to trade Denji's life for Santa's if need be, Makima seems to consider Denji less expendable than any of the other people this plan is endangering. Noted. Not a surprise, exactly, but still, worth noting down.

Second, from the way they're talking about Germany here, I get the impression that Europe is a whole lot less unified (let alone federated) than it is in OTL. And also Germany, specifically, is a diabolical powerhouse disproportionate to its population size and its conventional military strength.

And the Cold War either never happened, or got mostly forgotten about early on. Hmm.

...

Devils first started causing major timeline divergences in the 1920's. World War 2 either doesn't happen, or happens very differently. I suspect that the Nazis never end up rising to power, but instead there's a less deranged, more sustainable, flavor of reactionary politics that rides the tide of fear and resentment after Versailles and manages to overrun the Weimer Republic. Germany remains a belligerent military state throughout the twentieth century, but without doing a stupid like declaring war on the entire rest of the world.

I think that more or less fits the vibe I'm getting.

One question that the scale of Santa's destruction raises, though, is at what point countries actually declare war on each other in this setting. Reze had plausible deniability, having only been identified as a Soviet agent well after the fact. Santa Clause seems to be a known German asset, though, so having him start turning people by the hundreds in the middle of downtown Tokyo (rather than the more limited, more targeted violence of the other assassins, which is more in line with typical black ops skullduggery done under flags of peace that countries tend to just sigh at and return fire in kind) feels a lot like an act of war.

I don't think Germany expects Japan to declare war over this, though. And I get the impression that they are correct in their estimation. An attack of this scale falls juuuust shy of the MAD threshold, perhaps?

Or maybe Japan and Germany have been in a state of low-level conflict for this entire time, and Santa attacking Tokyo is the kind of thing both countries have just been periodically doing to each other for years now?

We don't know which countries are allowing people to travel freely-ish between them and which ones aren't. The only international travellers that have been identified as such so far have been agents. So, who's at war, who's at peace, and who's at "peace" remains an open question.

And, of course, there was that earlier comment of Makima's. About how the USSR, at least, would prefer the Chainsaw Devil be sent back to hell than remain under Makima's control. WAS she just using herself to refer to the Japanese government there, or did she mean exactly what she said? Do most countries have arrangements like Japan does with Makima, or does the international community see Japan as uniquely dangerous because of her? How important IS Makima, exactly?

Just these couple of cryptic pages of Makima giving orders to the spider devil and a couple of lackeys raise more questions and provoke more thought than most of the surrounding issues.

...

Issue #59, "Mess," initiates what seems like it will be the final act of the International Assassins arc. Santa finishes building a sufficient army, and triangulates Denji's current location. Makima and the rest of her enslaved devils and fiends prepare to sweep the area for Santa himself as soon as he makes his attack. The surviving American, Soviet(?), and Chinese assassins all prepare or don't prepare for this final clash in their own ways.

And meanwhile, somewhere coincidentally nearby, Kobeni mopes about the stupid dent that stupid Power put in the front of her stupid car.

I mean, we all know that in a couple of issues she's going to suddenly be standing behind Santa Clause with a knife in the back of his neck. But it's good to see what's going on with her until then, I suppose.


While there's good stuff in these middle issues of the volume, it also feels much more "generic shonen" than I've come to expect from "Chainsaw Man." All eyes on the newest succession of opponents with the newest succession of cool powers the author is proud of themselves for coming up with. Protagonists basically just rolling with the punches and not having time to reflect, introspect, or proact. Etc. It's a very well executed example of its kind (Santa Clause being as scary as he is, the almost Coen Brothers-ish well-timed black comedy interludes, etc, all help with this) but that still makes it a bit of a "meh" patch by CM's standards.

Hopefully the payoff will make up for it. In the meantime, at least we're getting some of the worldbuilding info that I've been craving, so I definitely appreciate that.

Probably two more posts for this volume.