Chainsaw Man #23-24 ("Gunfire" and "Curse")

This review was commissioned by @toxinvictory. This will be the first of probably three posts, covering the half-dozen chapters commissioned in this set.



We last left off on Chainsaw Man at a real cliffhanger, with the sudden assassination of Makima and one of her aides. Whether or not it was a successful assassination is hard to say, given Makima, but either way the fact that an organized group of armed humans is targeting her at all was a rugpull. Especially coming without warning, right in what seemed like the middle of a calm spot between devil-hunting missions.

I was expecting #23, "Gunfire," to start with Denji, Aki, and the gang reacting to the news of Makima's shooting. It turns out that the calm is ending a lot more thoroughly and abruptly than that, though. It turns out that it wasn't just Makima who got targeted; the entirety of Division 4 is under an organized, carefully-synchronized elimination strike. Denji, Aki, Power, Himeno, Kobeni, Arai, all of them are attacked at the same time as Makima.

And that's not even the biggest twist that this chapter drops on us.

With Kobeni and Arai being targeted while off walking together and their fates unseen (but I'm assuming the worst for now), Denji, Power, Himeno, and Aki come under fire while lunching at a restaurant together. The enemy obviously knows a lot about their targets, because this large concentration of powerful fighters that includes preternaturally hard-to-kill individuals has more than just gunmen coming after them. The attack on the restaurant is led by a ghost from Denji's past with an alarming trick up its sleeve.

I don't know that you can actually attribute that old Yakuza asshole's death back in issues 1-2 to Denji. As I recall, the zombie devil had already assimilated him, and Denji just cut down his reanimated corpse along with the many others. But that doesn't seem to be the version of the story that found its way to his grandson's ears. A few panels later, we learn where he might have heard the doctored version of events from, and why they might have doctored it.

Yeah. Oh shit.

On one hand, it's possible that the Gun Devil might not actually be behind this. It's a mysterious and infamous enough entity that I could easily see some other mastermind having co-opted its name and reputation during its absence. However, given that the Eternity Devil also seemed to want Denji's heart (aka Pochita), and that Eternity had one of Gunny's bullet casings in its possession, well...it still could be someone else gathering those bullet casings and handing them out to their agents while posing as Gunny, but Occam's Razor says it's actually him.

That still isn't the big reveal of this issue, though.

The Yakuza punk and his henchmen get enough of a drop on Denji and Power to shoot them a few times, and Himeno over across the restaurant takes a bullet too. Aki manages to avoid damage and takes out the baddies with a well-placed Fox Devil manifestation...or so it seems. After swallowing the assailants, the Fox Devil reports that one of the people it just swallowed tastes wrong. Not human. Not devil either. Something wholly unpalatable, and unfamiliar. And then, the Yakuza punk slashes his way out from the inside.

Meet Katana Man.

Presumably, he has the Katana Devil replacing his heart in the form of an adorable symbiotic sword-cat or something. Have their been other symbiotes like him and Denji before now? Was Denji the first, and this asshole the second? Or is there a vast conspiracy to keep the large number of preexisting symbiotes out of the public eye that's only now starting to break the surface?

Well. Two things that come immediately to mind:

1. Both of the symbiotes we've seen so far are closely connected to that old mobster who used to torment Denji. One of them is his victim, the other is his grandson. This could be a coincidence, but it's unlikely. Investigating whatever branch of the Tokyo yakuza this family was part of might yield some critical intelligence.

2. The other common thread between Denji and Yakuza-kun over here is the Gun Devil. Sort of. Implicitly. It hasn't escaped me that there's a common thread between "gun," "chainsaw," and "katana" that isn't shared by the other devils who have shown up so far. Weapon devils. Two of them are working together, and targeting the third. Maybe the symbiosis is something they specifically can do because a weapon is only scary when it has a wielder. If what we're looking at is an internal conflict within the weapon devil "family," then the grandfather might not actually be relevant. The other weapon devils, led by Gunny, just looked for a capable fighter who had a grudge against Denji for the Katana Devil to fuse with, and they found Yakuza-kun.

Granted, there are some holes in that second theory. For one thing, there are an awful lot of weapons out there, and so you'd think symbiotes would be a known thing by now. For another...chainsaws aren't actually weapons, exactly. They're weaponizable tools. Does this family of symbiotic devils include every potentially-weaponizable tool? Do the Scissors Devil, the Blowtorch Devil, and the Shovel Devil also fall into this group? If so, then that's even more symbiotic hybrids the world should have been seeing all along. So yeah, I don't know.

Another thought on the "weapon devil family" theory...would this mean that the Gun Devil itself was actually a symbiote? Maybe the reason he's been unseen for so long is because his human host died in the last rampage, and he's stuck doing behind-the-scenes mastermind stuff until he can find a new one? We don't know what Gunny looked like during his old rampage, so he might have had a similar sort of appearance to Chainsaw Man and Katana Man. On the other hand...if they looked similar, you'd think someone would have mentioned this to Denji by now.

Also, how does Makima's secret plot connect with Gunny's secret plot? It appears as if they're at cross purposes, but it could be more complicated than that.

But then, once again, it still could be that Gunny isn't actually involved at all and someone else is impersonating him and using harvested bullet casings to do so.


That's "Gunfire." More information needed. About a lot of things. Next up is #23, "Curse."


With Himeno wounded, Denji still regenerating, and the Fox Devil defeated, Aki instructs Power to bind Himeno's wounds while he tries to hold off Katana Man alone until Denji gets back in the fight. That's easier said than done, though. Katana Man has the same healing factor that Denji does, and - while his weapons don't have the strength and cutting power of Denji's chainsaws - they're much faster and more aerodynamic. As a traditionalist Yakuza princeling, it's probably safe to assume that he's also practiced a lot of swordplay even before getting them attached to his body, so he knows how to leverage that speed.

That said, Aki is no slouch himself when it comes to swordsmanship. He can't inflict wounds that stick on this regenerating monster, but he can at least keep him occupied and avoid getting hit himself.

Still, he knows he can't keep this up, and getting shot in the head point-blank by surprise in human form is taking Denji a lot longer to heal from than Aki hoped. With Himeno not able to help him, and Power busy keeping Himeno alive (I'm surprised Aki trusted her to do that, and - frankly - even more surprised that she appears to be doing a decent job of it), Aki resorts to desperate measures.

During the Eternity Devil siege, Aki was tempted to use this special cursed sword that Himeno talked him out of, telling him the price for its use was too great and their situation not yet desperate enough to justify it. That had been a pretty desperate situation, but, well, Himeno obviously isn't able to give her opinion about whether or not this one is worse enough, so Aki decides to go for it. He uses that strange, needle-like sword now, landing three glancing blows on Katana Man and repeating the word "fire" after each little prick. A creepy voice in the shadows counts them out. Then, after landing the third cut, Aki tells the Curse Devil bound to that sword that her victim has been marked and his fate sealed, she is free to come collect.

Okay that's really cool.

...

This would actually make a REALLY fun weapon to use in an RPG. "Hit an enemy thrice within X amount of time with this weapon, and they get hit by a massive damage bomb."

Lends itself to different sorts of tactics than your character might otherwise employ. Making it limited use in some fashion - either by giving it a painful cost as per the source material or just putting it on a long cooldown - also keeps the pace and tactics of the fights fresh since you'll be trying to land low-damage hits fast when you're using this, and probably trying to deal more damage per hit by default when you're not using it.

I'm tempted to give an item like this to one of my DnD groups and see how it plays in practice.

...

I do have to be a little critical here, though. When I first read this sequence, I had no idea what was supposed to have happened. I had to reread both it and the ensuing dialogue a couple of times before I understood. Of course, it's possible that the localization is more to blame for this than the mangaka, but I still thought it bore critiquing.

Anyway, I have no idea what that took out of Aki, in terms of price. Maybe it's sort of a fractal thing, where after the same person uses the sword's power three times they themselves are slain by the Curse Devil, or the like. But anyway, saving Himeno seems to have been worth it for him. And, after the Curse Devil's attack Katana Man is down and doesn't appear to be regenerating.

Then this other weirdo shows up out of nowhere and starts acting incredibly sus.

I'm not sure why Aki didn't come at her immediately, or at least try to keep her away from the body, given that behavior, but he pays dearly for that indecision. As soon as she's knelt over him, Katana Man gets back up. From Aki's reaction, I don't think this is meant to be a case of the regeneration just having taken a minute to start up.

Blondie has some kind of healing ability. A very, very powerful one. Possibly even outright resurrection, depending on just what state Katana Man is supposed to have been in after Curse squished him.

...

Healing (that is, healing other people) is really underrated as a bad guy power, imo. Especially for people in the "BBEG's field lieutenant" position as this girl seems to be. "Keeping your henchmen in the fight no matter what happens to them" is a readily available dark spin to put on the naturally positive connotations of "reversing harm."

I've seen it done before, but not very often. So, I appreciate Chainsaw Man for giving me another well-executed example.

...

Aki is either too stunned by what just happened, or too enervated from using the Curse Spike, to react with the speed he did to Katana Man's previous assault. The revived Yakuza-kun slashes his chest open before he can even lift his own blade.

I sure hope Denji is getting back to his feet just out-of-frame, because the team sure needs him right about now. Assuming he even still has a team at all at this point, Power notwithstanding. I don't *think* the comic would kill Aki off just yet, but it's surprised me enough times before now that I won't completely dismiss the possibility either.


That second chapter was mostly dialogue-free swordfighting, so I had less to say about it than expected. I'll just let this post be on the short end and save myself a few hundred words to use reviewing the next four chapters.