月刊ジャンプ漫画の紹介
Welcome to JUMP OTTACK! Thanks for joining us for our weekly take on the manga that appear in the Shonen Jump app.
I am your host, Mayu, and...
I am your co-host, Cisco.
This series is for anyone interested in finding a good new manga to follow, or anyone interested in what's happening week by week and month by month in Shonen Jump.
So, what's happening in this Monthly Shonen Jump?
Yeah, so I don't know if it's really appropriate to call it Monthly Shonen Jump.
It's the manga that come out only once a month in the Shonen Jump app.
I'm pretty sure Monthly Shonen Jump must have more titles than are represented by the ones that we get.
But, we get five. Sometimes, maybe there's more. Maybe there's one that didn't come out.
This month, there were five titles.
So, we got chapters of Blue Exorcist, Gokuraku Gai, Seraph of the End, Shouwa Shoten, and World Trigger.
Because it's our first episode of the Monthly Shonen Jump, I will talk a little bit about each one, and then also sort of pick a winner from this batch.
Okay.
So, all of these series have been running for a long time already.
And because they are monthly series, they often drop a large number of pages at once.
It's not uncommon for a monthly manga to have a 40-page chapter.
So, Blue Exorcist has been going on for a very long time.
It seems to be in its final arc, also, of sort of finishing up.
And the story follows the son of Satan, literally.
And his brother, who is maybe—I don't know.
I feel like, one, I don't actually know, because I sort of forgot what happened in the middle chunk of the series.
But him and his brother, and they go to exorcist school.
And the first part of the manga is really good, where they're at school.
They have, you know, Mephistopheles, or I'm not really sure how to say that name.
Please, someone correct me.
Anyway, that guy is one of their teachers.
They have exorcist peers from around the world who all use different types of exorcism.
It's entertaining. It's got a lot of different religions in it.
This month's chapter is sort of just, again, the middle of the final arc,
where they're trying to invade a place and take all the bad guys down.
And because there's so many characters, and every character has to fight some other character,
it's been stuck in a bit of a rut.
Maybe that's not fair to say.
It's been repeating the same kind of pattern of like,
and now this team of people goes and fights this team of people for quite a while.
So I like it. It's a good manga.
This week's chapter is following up on that.
I don't want to say more for spoiler reasons.
Goku Daku Gaiの紹介
Next is Goku Daku Gai.
This is a comparatively new manga in the monthly batch of chapters that comes out.
It's about a boy who is half-demon and has a plug in his chest that he can pull out to become more powerful.
I picture something like Chainsaw Man.
Yeah, it's got some Chainsaw Man vibes.
He doesn't turn into chainsaws, but he does get stronger when he pulls this out.
The thing about this series that I think is kind of funny is that the bad guys in it are all called magas,
and it's transliterated as MAGA.
So it feels like it's got like a political bent to it because he's constantly fighting the MAGA.
What's MAGA?
That's just like the name of the bad guys in this particular series is MAGA.
And so like for an American audience, that brings up like a whole bunch of political connotations.
It's got some really good story.
It's like I said, it's pretty new.
If you were looking for a series to jump into and read from the beginning,
this is probably your best bet out of the batches that are here.
It's got a little bit of like a Chinese flavor because they live in Chinatown,
but it's mostly about him and his older female partner who's kind of like an Onesan type.
She uses a gun, and there are a bunch of other characters at this point,
like somebody who has like a dog.
I don't know if he is a dog.
That's not explained.
He just looks like a dog, and they're fighting demons, and he's half demon.
It's a pretty standard setup.
Seraph of the Endの感想
Next is Seraph of the End.
I like to like all manga, but this one's not for me.
It's about, I think it's like 140 chapters in.
I don't think I've been reading it since the beginning, but I think I got in pretty early on.
And the plot is very full of twists and turns, maybe too many for my liking.
The art is great.
I actually really like the art style, but I don't love the writing.
Some of the characters' lines feel like really, really trite to me and kind of hackneyed.
I don't know.
It goes back and forth.
There have been some good chapters, but overall, this one's not my favorite.
If you like vampires, and you like lots of fighting, and you love people saying,
because you're my family over and over again, then this one's for you.
The fourth one is Showa Shoten.
This is easily my favorite of the bunch.
It's about two friends doing Japanese stand-up comedy, a particular type called manzai comedy.
We don't really have this in America, but it's kind of like a two-comedian routine,
where there's always someone called the boke and someone called the tsukomi.
The tsukomi is the straight man, right?
Tsukomi is the not funny one?
I mean, like when somebody makes a joke, tsukomi is like,
always try to correct it.
Why you say that?
It's a reasonable person's response.
And the boke is the one being funny or weird.
So it's a style of Japanese comedy, and this manga does a great job of exploring
what makes that type of comedy work or not work,
and it has a bunch of different competing comedian groups,
and it's very modern, and it's great.
So this one, the main characters are finally,
after several chapters of other comedy pairings going on,
trying to win this contest, they're finally about to take the stage.
So the next chapter is going to be really, really good.
ワールドトリガーの複雑さ
And last is World Trigger.
World Trigger has been running for also a very long time,
and I read this from the beginning and feel like I kind of have a handle
on all the different things that have happened, which is saying a lot,
because I think I would want to look up how many characters are in this manga,
but it's got to be close to 50 to 100 people.
And the manga artist has somehow managed to give them all different hairstyles,
and lots of them have glasses or faces,
such that you're able to actually tell the difference
between the different characters, both in their regular drawn appearances
and in their super-deformed face-only versions.
But it's a ridiculous number of people in this,
and they've been stuck in an arc about them being in a training-slash-test
for years, I think, at this point.
So I find it very satisfying,
because it's a sci-fi manga that plays by its own rules,
and, my God, does it have a lot of rules.
It really feels like a manga that would be great as a video game,
マンガの推薦とレビュー
and you can definitely tell that the person who wrote it
is super-influenced by video games,
because a lot of what they're doing is just fighting each other.
It also really gives me Ender's Game vibes,
because much of the story is about these different teams of people
fighting against each other in ranked battles,
which is a big chunk of the plot of Ender's Game.
And I love that.
Ender's Game is a major favorite of mine from when I was a little kid,
and it's really stood up, and I think this manga
draws from all the right parts of that book.
I think my pick for this week, and maybe every week,
is Showa Shoten, because I just really love
the way it examines the world of manzai comedy,
but World Trigger is for sure my runner-up.
I also really like that.
And I think all of these are good.
Seraph of the End, again, not for me,
but maybe for someone who really liked Twilight,
that's my feeling.
I've read the first volume of Showa Shoten,
and I really enjoyed it.
Japanese comedy and American comedy are very, very different.
I don't know, sometimes I don't understand American comedy.
I mean, it's hard to understand...
American joke!
Yeah, it's hard to understand if you don't know the culture
for either side.
Absolutely.
Anyway, anything you'd like to add?
No, I think that's kind of it.
I would like some feedback, if people are actually listening to this,
about whether me recapping each manga is helpful,
or whether sticking to just one recommendation per week is better.
But other than that,
I hope you enjoyed learning about these new manga,
and that you pick one that's fun for you to read.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.
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Peace.
