Chainsaw Man #1: “Dog & Chainsaw”

This review was commissioned by @Doby Mick


Every comic I've had to read lately has a title that reminds me of Doom. First we had "Kill Six Billion Demons," and now it's "Chainsaw Man." This one is a weekly Shonen Jump manga that started coming out in 2018 and, as is the way of these things, is still going.

It's kind of ironic. In this project so far I've done anime, and I've done comics, but this is going to be the first manga. No, the Marvel thing doesn't count.


The first page gives us a solid opening premise. A lumber jack is in much more debt than he can pay off by lumber-jacking. He's sold an eye, a kidney, and a testicle of his but he's still thirty-eight million yen (about 3.8 million dollars US) in debt. What the hell did he pay for? Anyway, he needs to make money quick, so the one-eyed, one-kidneyed, one-testicled man is going out bounty-hunting. He's bringing his pet with him, which - true to the issue's title - is some sort of dog/chainsaw hybrid.

A decade ago, it was cats and poptarts. Things have escalated.

It's not just any bounties he's after, but devils. Apparently, this world has a serious devil problem, and killing them is one of the fastest ways to make dosh. Each diabolical corpse is worth 300k yen, so...well, he'll need to kill quite a few of them, but still, he's determined that it's his best bet. I do have to admire the guy's positive attitude and optimistic demeanor, if nothing else.

He quickly finds himself a large, spherical monster crawling around on a dozen humanlike limbs. We don't see the fight, but a panel later he and his pet/weapon have triumphed, and he's presenting the corpse to whoever pays the bounties on these things. This crawling sphere monster is called a "tomato devil," apparently.

Turns out the people buying devil bodies from him are the yakuza, and it's seemingly not for public protection so much as the bodies being usable for something, and valuable on the black market. They're also the people he owes money to, and who he sold his organs to. The debts are all inherited from his late father.

Damn. Harsh.

The mobsters take nearly all of the corpse's value to cover a payment on his debts, leaving him barely enough to survive unless he can get another body before his rent and bills are up. As they drive smugly away, the yakuza shakedowners name the boy as Denji, and his chainsaw dog as a minor devil that he's somehow managed to tame. Huh. That's certainly something.

Before they leave though, one of them leans out the car window and offers Denji 100 yen if he'll eat a cigarette. He does it.

The car departs, its occupants laughing, and Denji retires to his miserable little shack, where he eats bread with nothing on it.

Denji passes out, and dreams us up a flashback sequence. His father committed suicide unexpectedly, leaving Denji with his huge yakuza debt. Which the yakuza told him he'd have to pay the first installment on the day after the funeral, or else he's dead.

This is more of a parody of wooby rags-to-riches narratives than an actual example of one.

As Denji was about to despair, wandering morosely in the woods near the graveyard, he happened upon a very small and very chainsaw hellhound. He tries to let it kill him, as devils are wont to do, not wanting the yakuza to have the satisfaction of selling his organs or whatever, but the dog is badly hurt and unable to do more than limp toward him. Denji tries something desperate; devils can restore themselves to health by drinking human blood, and they are also bound to obey contracts as per folklore. So, he heals the chainsawdog with his blood, and binds it to serve him as a weapon and/or pet that he can use to kill other devils.

He sells himself to the debt-collectors as an indentured devil hunter, working to pay off his debts with devil bodies. Of course, given the indications of crooked bookkeeping, they might not be planning to ever let him buy himself free.

Although, given that he apparently is making them a good amount of money with his devil-hunting, you'd think they'd want him to stay healthy. The starvation diet and organ-selling doesn't really add up, in light of that. Assuming he's any good at devil-hunting, which by all indications he is.

He wakes up during the night, hunger making it hard for him to sleep. More than anything, he wishes for companionship. Female companionship in particular, which he feels he'll never be able to get with his poverty and lack of a proper house to bring her to. Honestly, I think that "sup hoes, I kill devils for a living, wanna pet my chainsaw?" could be a pretty effective pickup technique, but I think the unspoken part of this is that he's afraid of putting someone else in the yakuza's crosshairs. He dreams of having a woman love him, and of eating bread with actual jam on it with her.

Then, in the predawn hours, he wakes up coughing blood. That's not good. Especially since his mother's death by heart failure was preceded by coughing up blood. Um...leaky heart, I guess? maybe? Anyway, the misfortunes piling up on this guy continue to be more comic than tragic in their sheer over-the-topness and (in some cases) illogic. Just then, the mobsters come back and yank him out of bed, as there's been another devil sighting and they want to get to this before anyone legitimate does. Upon bringing him there, they explain that they've made their own deal with their own devil acquaintance, and are now murdering devil-hunters before it in exchange for its power.

Even though they're the ones who made him become a devil-hunter. I guess they must have lied to it. Or else it just has some specific blue-and-orange morality beef against people who physically perform the act of killing devils, and not against accessories to the act. Or...oh, I see.

Yakuza tried to make a pact with this thing, and fell under its control immediately. That explains why they went to get Denji in the middle of the night; it just commanded them to start bringing it devil-slayers as soon as they were under its control.

Also, the floating lumpy devil here seems to think he's avenging his murdered kind, and is fully intelligent. We don't know the full backstory yet, of course, but depending on how this conflict started it may not be the devils who are the bad guys here. There's been mention of them drinking human blood, sure, but...well, the humans seem eager to use devil bodies as well, so there might just be moral equivalence there. Again, depending on how this all started.

Anyway, the devil's slaves chop Denji and chainsawdog into pieces and throw them into a dumpster as per their master's instructions. A trickle of blood from Denji's mutilated corpse trickles down into chainsawdog's mouth, and it's still just barely alive enough to give it a lick. Regenerating itself, at least partway.

Then Denji...wakes up in his shack. This was all a dream, I guess. Okay.

He picks up his chainsawdog, and starts doing his dayjob as a lumber jack. Which he may or may not have been before he got his pet and made a pact with it, since, well, it's kinda vital equipment.

As he muses over the probability of him dying very young (perhaps inspired by that dream), he tells chainsawdog that he knows some devils can possess the bodies of the recently deceased. So, if he dies, he wants chainsawdog to hop into his body and try to have a happy, normal life in it, even if he never could himself.

Jump back to the dumpster. Oh, I see. It wasn't a dream, that was just a flashback. I feel like they could have organically included that at the beginning of the comic instead of as a flashback now. Would have been less confusing. Ah well.

Anyway, chainsawdog seems to be biologically fusing his body with Denji's. Presumably part of the process of possessing his corpse, as per Denji's wishes. He also seems to be healing that body back to prime condition, regenerating not only the mortal wounds but also the missing eye and other sold organs.

Then Denji's in a psychedelic version of his shack, and Chainsawdog can talk now. Probably mental communication enabled by their physical merging.

Chainsawdog offers Denji a second contract, building off of his will. The devildog will give Denji his heart. In exchange, he wants Denji to let him experience his dreams. Denji agrees. Then, Denji wakes up in the dumpster, his body completely intact, with the end of the dog's chainsaw-cord tail sticking out of his chest.It looks like the dog has physically become his heart, and their fusion is able to regenerate constantly by combining Denji's human blood with Chainsawdog's diabolical blood-magic. Quite a powerful superorganism, they've become. I wonder if there are others like them in the world?

I'm guessing "show me your dreams" means "live the life you've wanted to live, and let me experience it with you as part of a compound entity." That's pretty damned reasonable. Evidence for the devils not necessarily being the bad guys is mounting.

When the zombie-making devil and its zombie army see him get out of the trash bin, they try to kill him again. However, in addition to his super regeneration, fusing with the dog has also turned him into a werechainsaw.

No, I mean that. Like a werewolf, but instead of wolf it's chainsaw.

The newly reborn Chainsaw Man slaughters the entire army, including the servitors that used to be the yakuza who enslaved him (he takes particular satisfaction in killing those ones), and then the big devil itself. It's barely even a fight.

Shortly afterward, some other devil-hunters arrive.

The lady in the middle is going to be that waifu Denji's been craving, I assume. Well, if so, it's a good thing he now has both nuts to empty into her.

She and her henchmen find him, still in werechainsaw form, and ask him if he killed the devil and its army. Apparently, they knew this was a zombifying devil before they went hunting for it. When he says yes, and they confirm that he isn't actually a devil himself despire appearances to the contrary, the leader of the team does this:

He explains his situation to them as best he can. She tells him that he has two choices; either be killed as a devil, or be recruited by her government-sponsored organization as a human. Well, sort of. The way she actually puts it is:

O...okay.

A panel later, she even says that he'll be her pet, and that she'll feed him.

I guess this is going in a weird femdom direction? That's definitely the vibe I'm getting. So uh. Okay, I guess?

He asks what she plans to feed him, and she answers correctly, and least as far as breakfast is concerned.

Well. Sign him right on, then. That's definitely worth accepting over...um...death.

End issue.


There really is no avant-garde like Japanese avant-garde, is there? I'm not sure if this is funny or exciting or ironic or...what. It makes me want to read more, at least for the time being, but I can't really put my finger on why it makes me want to read more. It's like Army of Darkness by way of Franz Kafka, but dosed on a hazardous and potentially lethal amount of shonen. And then throw on some...I dunno, Studio Ghibli? Doctor Seuss? Something between those two to inform some of the aesthetics.

This is the first of four issues commissioned, so I guess we'll see. For now, I'll award this comic a whopping WTF out of ten.