Chainsaw Man #26-27 ("The Gun is Mightier" and "From Kyoto")

Apparently, "All About Power" was an omake thing, not an actual chapter. Explains why it was so short. So, there are still three more chapters to cover in this set.


"The Gun is Mightier" (presumably "than the chainsaw") starts with Blondie McSnakewitch finally naming herself as she calls for backup to deal with the revived Denji.

Sawatari, then. Okay.

Sawatari seems reluctant to summon Snake again, probably for reasons related to the profuse bleeding from her fingernails visible above, and she doesn't seem to be armed herself. So, it's just Denji vs. Yakuza-kun for the next little while until her reinforcements arrive. On one hand, it's kind of a low-tension sequence, since it quickly becomes clear neither of them is going to manage to disable the other anytime soon. On the other, it's a useful trick for the author, giving us a chance to see the two's relative strengths and weaknesses for a page or so, presumably to make some later battles with more participants easier for us to follow. Speed and technique on one side, versus near-unstoppable force on the other. Katanaman can only land glancing blows while avoiding Denji's more powerful attacks.

Unfortunately, things turn sour fast when the reinforcements arrive and Denji starts getting distracted by gunshots, giving his opponent more time to maneuver and thus land meaningful hits. When he isn't busy dodging chainsaws, Katanaman attacks so fast that Denji can't even keep track of where he is.

Denji tries to grab one of the gunmen to use as a hostage. Mafia-kun is annoyed by this, but not that annoyed. These mooks are mildly expensive, but not really valuable in the way that Denji had been hoping for. Which means that, at the end of the day, grabbing the guy and holding still with him just makes Denji an easier target.

Regenerating the entire lower half of his body is going to leave Denji pretty anaemic. He'll have to switch back to human form afterward if he wants to live. His heart is still intact, meanwhile, so mission accomplished. Katanaman, Sawatari, and their remaining henchmen grab the living half of Denji and start dragging him away, leaving Aki bleeding out, Himeno apparently disintegrated, and Power fled.

Well, we'll see if Power does something uncharacteristically brave. Or characteristically stupid, but in a coincidentally helpful direction this time.

Returning to human form, Yakuza-kun gives a gloating little speech about his group's victory over the Tokyo devil hunting agency. Turns out it's not just division 4 that was targeted, but all the teams present in Tokyo at the time. At least four squads.

Granted, I'm not sure if Yakuza-kun should be gloating about the overwhelming power of guns, when that's not even what he personally brought to the fight. Honestly, while firearms did play a role in the victory here, they probably would have won using swords and knives alone given the same element of surprise and well-coordinating timing.

That said, the killteam sent to ambush Makima and her attendant on the train end up not fairing as well as it initially appeared. I was waiting for Makima to get back up from her ostensibly deadly gunshot wounds, and, well, she does. She was just waiting for the enemies to all have their backs turned so she could maximize her own surprise advantage.

We don't see what happens next. Classic horror movie discretion cut. Instead, we jump to the officials who were waiting to meet Makima at the station in Kyoto, recieving the news that Makima was killed en route and that Public Security divisions 1-4 were simultaneously wiped out in a series of armed ambushes carried out across Tokyo. It's surprising that this criminal organization, whoever they are exactly, was able to bring so many illegal firearms to bear. Japan's gun restrictions have only gotten stricter than OTL since the Gun Devil's rampage, and they didn't think anyone would manage to accumulate that many under their watch.

Hmm. Well. Either the Gun Devil can conjure guns ex nihilo for his human mooks to use, or he has agents on the inside.

...

Granted, up until a few issues ago I thought that Makima was the Gun Devil's agent on the inside, but...well, I guess she technically still could be. Having her be targeted by the assassins along with everyone else might be a ploy to remove suspicion from her.

But, while that's possible, I think it's more likely than not at this point that there are two competing devilish conspiracies at work, with Makima at the center of one and Gunny the other. I still wouldn't be especially *surprised* if it turned out they were in it together, but I'm leaning more against it.

...

When the train reaches Kyoto, the agents are surprised when Makima steps off the car unhurt. What she tells them further reinforces my suspicion that she did not, in fact, know that this was coming.

Having her story be that she miraculously didn't get shot when everyone else did would make her seem more suspicious, rather than less. Which isn't the kind of rookie mistake that I'd expect Makima to make, if the purpose of this stunt was to make herself look trustworthy in the face of an external enemy. So yeah. I'm now 80/20 on this attack having legitimately blindsided her.

Interestingly, the fact that she's lying to these other agents about how she survived suggests that they don't know what she is. It's still possible that some of her higher-ups within the Japanese government do know, but if so the information is being kept within a very small circle of individuals. Noted.

Anyway, the train attack group are all dead. We don't know exactly what Makima did to them, but...okay, actually I take it back. This is the state she left their bodies in:

At first I thought we were seeing a bird's eye view of the investigators standing over the bodies, and that those black circles were the tops of their heads, but no. That is four dead bodies with giant holes blasted through their torsos.

The damage profile doooooes look an awful lot like a miniature version of what the Gun Devil did to the cities it attacked. So, maybe Makima actually is Gunny or an agent of his after all, with these four dummies having been sacrificed to throw the authorities off.

Then again - and, once more, by the same token - if those are Gunny wounds, then the coroners are bound to notice that they are Gunny wounds. Which, again, makes Makima look more suspicious rather than less. So, most likely that's not what happened. She or her pet devil have some other attack that leaves circular puncture wounds.

...actually. Are those punctures, actually, or did their chests explode from within? The placement of the holes doesn't appear to align perfectly with this, but that might just be an art mishap, so...thinking about what she did to Denji earlier, could Makima be something like a Heart Devil? Multiple interpretations of "heart" that let her manipulate desires as well as literal chest cavities?

Or maybe her diabolical nature is more specifically sexual after all, and she impaled these losers with a giant dick.

Still too many possibilities. But we've seen what Makima is capable of in combat, and possibly learned at least a liiiittle bit about her relationship with the powers that be in Japan.

Chainsaw Man #27, "From Kyoto," follows directly from this scene, with Makima and the other government people discussing how they should react to the events in Tokyo. None of them seem especially shocked at what Makima did to the train attackers, so whatever they think she actually is this offensive ability is consistent with it (whereas her surviving a bullet to the head without so much as a mark is not).

As for other things that her colleagues do and don't already know about, well. I'm glad I didn't have too much to say about the first few chapters of this review set, because this next bit is going to require the typing of words. A large number of words.

She determines that the main target of the attack is most likely Denji and his heart. And also that, with their personnel in Tokyo in a state of total disarray after that devastating attack, they're going to need outside assistance in a lot less time than it would take reinforcements to arrive by train or even helicopter in order to react in time. So, Makima instructs these local officials thusly:

On one hand, "borrow" implies that they're going to be returned afterward. On the other hand, let's be real, she probably means it in the sense of "can I borrow a bite of your sandwich?"

Also, "serving out life sentence or worse." I believe that Japan (at least in some prefectures) has capital punishment on the books IRL, but I don't think they do it enough to have more than a couple of death row inmates laying around at any given time. So, either Chainsawverse Japan executes a lot more people, or they have an actual, formalized tier of convict used for ritual sacrifice as needed. Either way, this is consistent with the more authoritarian, callous world that previous issues implied, but it's also confirmation of some of those policies in a concrete way that we didn't have before.

Anyway. If these people are nonchalant about "sacrifice the first thirty inmates we can get to the shrine in a short time," then it makes Makima's need to keep certain things secret from them even more ominous.

The timeline of this part is a little wonky. I was under the impression that the attacks on Makima, Kobeni and Arai, and Denji's group happened within a few minutes of each other, and that it didn't take more than a quarter hour or so after that for Denji to get cut in half. However, apparently Makima is able to get herself and thirty bound and blindfolded convicts up onto a mountaintop shrine in less time than it takes for the baddies to drag Denji into their getaway vehicle. So yeah, I'm looking a little side-eyed at the timing of these events. But that issue aside, this sequence is powerful, awe-inspiring, and completely horrifying.

As the Gun Devil's agents (Team Gun? Fireteam? Fireteam) start bringing Denji's unconscious upper half into their van, one of them is spontaneously crushed. Not impaled like Makima did to those guys on the train. Flattened. Like an invisible, building-sized steel block just fell on him while leaving everything around him - including his clothes - untouched. One moment he's alive and on his feet, and the next he's a very flat, mostly circular, pattern of gore.

Curiously, Fireteam leader Sawatari reacts to this by immediately radioing HQ and asking them to re-confirm Makima's death.

Her answer comes in the form of a lack of an answer. Followed by, well.

Sawatari apparently connected this form of attack with Makima the moment she saw it. However, she seems to have not known that Makima can't be killed with bullets.

What this says to me is that the Gun Devil's inside agent has about the same level of access as the people Makima met at the station. They know more or less what she's capable of in terms of offensive power, but they don't seem to know what she is. They probably assume that she's just a warlock with an exceptionally powerful patron Meteorite Devil or something. Notably, those two officials are also present at the mountaintop shrine, and also blindfolded to prevent them from knowing exactly how Makima does what she does.

The actual process raises more questions in and of itself.

After she has a convict repeat the name of a Fireteam member, she sympathetically grinds the latter to a bloody smear between her hands. A moment later, the convict falls dead as well, the cause of death far less apparent.

Did she magically know the names of the Fireteam members, or was she just going down a list of probable suspects? Were a bunch of innocent suspects being pancaked in their houses in between the actual Fireteamers? And of course, for each such death - guilty or otherwise - there's also another person being sacrificed on the mountaintop. Some of them would have been executed soon anyway. Others would not have been.

She either runs out of convicts, runs out of names, or runs out of energy. Sawatari and Yakuza-kun are still alive, but it's pretty much just them surrounded by a veritable sea of souped underlings. With just the two of them, and themselves and their truck all covered in gore, escape seems unlikely. At the shrine, Makima tells her companions that she's finished now and will be returning to Tokyo to assess the damage in person.

You know. A lot of bystanders must have seen those gangsters get pulped. Did they all know that this is something the government did, even if most of them probably don't know the name or face of Makima to connect it to?

Imagine living in that world. The sum total of 21st century police statism, manifested as...this. If they know your name, they can sacrifice prisoners to make you dead. The association with heights and imagery of being crushed from above is probably a deliberate evocation of satellite surveillence and drone strikes. The names being spoken, guilt assumed based on either eldritch information sources or (even worse) estimated probabilities based on the civil database, are a transparent metaphor for personal data mining. And of course, the built-in connection with prisons and executions in the form of her sacrificial fuel.

A nightmare about the police state given form.

The Police Devil? The Surveillance Devil? The Government Devil?

Whatever Makima is, her nature is either closely linked to something like that, or she's calling on a devilish ally with such a name. Whether or not it's Makima herself, this use of the power is definitely a good investment for the entity that possesses it. What could increase the people's fear of the all-seeing eye and inescapable crushing hand of the state more than a display like this?

That doesn't square with the hyper-orgasm trick she used on Denji before. But, well...there's a new complicating factor here that these last few chapters have introduced. Aki with his curse-sword established a precedent of one person having access to the powers of more than one devil. There's also one panel during the shrine scene where the two blindfolded agents muse about "which devils," plural, Makima might be calling upon, and grumble about this information being above their grade. So, if characters calling upon multiple devils at a time is A Thing now, then it's pointless to try and find a common theme behind all of Makima's powers. They could all come from different devils with vastly different purviews.

At the same time, the comic has been very, very consistent about warlocks only getting active, external powers from their patrons. Causing devilish manifestations to happen in the moment through ritual and will. Their patrons don't make them stronger, faster, or tougher. No devil hunter becomes bulletproof by making a contract, and everyone - both ally and enemy of the hunters - makes their plans around this being the case. Surviving the train ambush is something that only a devil (or some kind of devil-human hybrid, like a fiend or a symbiote) could do.

So, whatever Makima is, she's NOT just a human with multiple powerful devils on call. She might be a fiend or symbiote with friends. She could be an unusually human-looking devil who exchanges favors with a few others. Or she could be something different that we haven't been properly introduced to yet. She's not human though. Or at least, not mostly human.

Of course, the detail of her needing a SHRINE to do what she did...that doesn't square with anything else we've seen in this comic. At all. Not thematically, or aesthetically, or metaphysically. So, there's definitely *something* new and different at play here as well as whatever combination of preexisting things. But, well, that just brings up another subject that I already had in mind from these chapters.

Is "devil" just an unflattering word for "god?"

It was actually the Snake Devil that first got me thinking about this. Admittedly, I'm poorly equipped to understand herpetophobia. Snakes are one of the very, very, very few animals that I have no feelings about whatsoever, either positive or negative. I don't think they're cute, or gross, or pretty, or scary. I see a snake, and my bone-deep emotional reaction to it is "I see a snake." But, nonetheless...for people who are afraid of snakes, does the fear have anything even remotely to do with snakes being an archaic symbol of healing? If devils are empowered by fear of a thing, then you'd expect their appearances and powers to exaggerate the thing's more fearsome aspects. But they don't.

To be fair, it might be that Sawatari was calling on multiple devils herself. But this isn't the only example.

Lots of people are afraid of bats, but literally no one is afraid of bats because they echolocate. And yet, rather than the Bat Devil's superattack being something that involves lurking in the darkness or drinking blood or getting tangled up in your hair, it's a weaponized sonar pulse.

I think again about the emotions Makima's display evoked in me. Fear and horror, yes, but also awe. And I look at the shrine. And I wonder.


Next time is #28, "Secrets & Lies."