Comic Bastards

View Original

Review: Weekly Shonen Jump #50

I'm worried about Sanji, you guys. What happened to Sanji?!  Okay that's all I have about One Piece.

WSJ 50Have I mentioned how smart My Hero Academia is?  I just can't get over how cerebral Horikoshi is willing to be when it comes to his characters and the way their powers fit together to augment or dominate each other.  We saw a lot of this kind of cerebral stuff during the initial fights between all the students, but now Horikoshi is giving us both barrels by showing how students team up against teachers in situations specifically designed to put the kids at the biggest disadvantage possible.  Still, they've been paired up for success.  It's making for a development of all kinds of characters while he gets to visually showcase their powers, as well as showing how much of a student of superheroing Midoriya is.  Great stuff.

I was a naysayer of Kubo's final grandstanding of the Sternritters vs. Soul Society when the (maybe?  hopefully?  probably? ) final arc of Bleach began.  Despite unevenness in Kubo's storytelling overall, I take back a good part of my criticism: these final fights are a gorgeous exercise in design, in personal story, and in the full limits of the powers of characters on all sides of this fight.  The last two fights (technically this one isn't even really over yet) have been absolute visual poetry.  They all have a quiet to them that suggests to me that Kubo might really be winding things down.  These fights are very much starting to read less like Shonen, and more like a unique love letter to Bleach itself.

I'm not a huge fan of Seraph of the End, but things have started to move very quickly and I really enjoyed this chapter.  It had some of the better art I've seen from this series in a (mostly) talky chapter.  This chapter was interesting enough visually and story-wise that it made me want to comb back through to refresh things for the upcoming pivotal moments of this series.

Food Wars continues in a great direction, but I'll have more to say about that when the shit starts to go down next chapter.


Score: 4/5


Weekly Shonen Jump #50 Writers: Various Artists: Various Publisher: Viz Media Release Date: 11/9/15 Format: Weekly; Digital