Reviews

Like Chainsaw Man, Fire Punch is a morally grey action series with heaps of black humor and the same indie sensibility that endeared shounen readers to Tatsuki Fujimoto's work. Both feel like bridges between the strictly-codified works of Shounen Jump and the high-concept sci-fi that tends to seep into more "underground" series in a similar vein. The characters of Fire Punch are living in an abjectly hopeless world where horrifying, graphic acts are commonly deployed to generate comparisons with post-war wastelands and historical atrocities, or grim, post-apocalyptic novels like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Unlike traditional shounen, which is driven by single-minded determination and teamwork, the characters of Fire Punch are only kept alive by their (often irrational and/or destructive) personal goals, which intertwine to create social commentary on issues like discrimination, mob mentality, and religious fanaticism.

In the end, though, Fire Punch's message is similar to many "shounen-seinen" works: life endures, even when it shouldn't, even when it doesn't "deserve" to, and even when there's nothing to look forward to. Fujimoto's loose and crosshatch-heavy style fits the snow-covered wasteland of the setting, as well as the rough fight scenes full of charred bodies, which sometimes seem to intentionally recall real photographs of holocausts and disasters. All in all, it's hard to shake off the feeling that all this cynical preaching about humanity's fundamental ugliness and the world's indifference to life are being used to bludgeon an un-discerning reader into feeling awed by the cyclical, cosmic conclusion.

While Fire Punch attempts to arrive to its conclusion by virtue of its characters, Fujimoto's less action-heavy scenes are always dominated by silence and ellipses, long stretches of time elided between panels, which don't necessarily give us a look into the (often alien-to-us) minds of his main players. As such, most of them come off as rough sketches. As a sci-fi work, Fire Punch fares better, as it knows when to explain things succinctly and when to leave things to the reader's imagination, instead of delving into the self-indulgent overelaboration of so many similar works. All in all, Fire Punch announces Fujimoto as a distinct voice in the shounen world, but it's also an obvious early work with plenty to be polished.