I’ve mentioned before that I’m a complicated Fujimoto stan. But aside from my feelings on the ever-present culture of misogyny in anime and manga, I think Tatsuki Fujimoto is one of the greatest mangaka I’ve ever read. And the way that Fire Punch hit me like a truck absolutely confirmed that. 

Fire Punch has a lot of the flaws that normally would make me throw a manga in the trash, particularly the constant attempted sexual assaults. Fujimoto does get some kudos for the way they get depicted—with the exception of Chapter 8–as more shock value than cheap sexual thrill, but it’s still upsetting to read. There’s also the fact that one of the central relationships in the manga is incestuous. But “upsetting” is the name of the game in Fire Punch: this series is so horrifically depressing it gets hard to believe. 

Fire Punch is about pain. In this post-apocalyptic frozen wasteland, there is a man with regenerative abilities who has been set on fire. His body regenerates faster than it can burn. He is forever being consciously burned alive. In a nutshell, that is Fire Punch; what if there was a pain that you knew would never end? How do you live? Why do you live? It’s gratuitously dark, for sure; Fujimoto’s art is bursting with such vivid feelings of emptiness and struggle. It’s almost like a warped metaphor for mental illness. For me, the crux of the series is how potently Fujimoto’s personal obsessions come through on the page. The themes that you can triangulate throughout his works, like consumption and love, religious cults and belief, manipulation and bad B-movies, they all take center stage in Fire Punch. 

For example, movies. Fujimoto likes movies, that’s pretty obvious from the homages in the Chainsaw Man anime’s opening. In Fire Punch, much like in Goodbye, Eri, movies are literally part of the text: one of the plot-driving characters is an amateur director whose only reason to live is to try to make an interesting movie. But Fire Punch is concerned with deeper themes; the mechanics of belief, the lines between fiction and reality. If someone believes what they see in a movie, does it become “real”? When is something “real enough”? 

Not only are characters in the story constantly lying to each other and the reader, the boundaries of what is real in the story itself keeps shifting. There’s a big reveal that there was no evil Ice Witch, Earth just entered another natural ice age, and then two chapters later the Ice Witch herself appears and says that humanity actually abandoned Earth to go colonize other planets so long ago that those interstellar civilizations are now also dead. Is any of this true? Does it even matter? That’s what Fire Punch is concerned with. I could go on forever about the way this manga bends reality in surreal and gut-punching ways, its deeply fucked-up premise allowing for questions like, if you meet a woman who looks exactly like your dead sister, and you brainwash her into thinking she is your sister, is it incest when you sleep together? What version of the truth is the one that’s supposed to matter in this situation? 

Every theme and motif in Fire Punch can be spun out to its logical extreme: truth, lies, belief, religion, incest, “fuel”, cannibalism. And this depth of philosophy is engaging because of how personal it feels. I’m drawn to media with really strong authorial intent. It’s why I like Neon Genesis Evangelion so much, because you can see and feel Hideaki Anno’s vision, for better and for worse. And Fire Punch is like if you took all of the personal impressions Fujimoto leaves on his works and concentrated them into 83 chapters of madness. 

The other really tonally interesting piece to Fire Punch is that it manages to be all of the aforementioned psychological high art while simultaneously being balls-to-the-wall bananas stupid. The complete whiplash is part of what makes it so good, in my opinion. It strikes this specific tone, this vibe somewhere in between comedy and tragedy that I have a hard time explaining but that is palpable to an extent in Chainsaw Man, but is really visible in Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro. It’s not exactly flipping back and forth between the grotesque, the sad, and the funny, it’s marrying them all together in a weird polygamy where you end up with tender scenes of friendship that involve one character cutting another’s face off. It has the funniest Star Wars namedrop ever immediately followed by one of the realest conversations about gender dysphoria that I’ve ever seen in manga, all of which is sandwiched between cannibalism, arson, and immense personal tragedy. 

Fire Punch is weird, and upsetting, and tasteless, and violent, and it left me with such powerful emotions that it felt like the story had reached into my brain and rattled me. It immersed me so violently that when I finished the manga–at 4 AM–I just went back to the first chapter to make the feeling last longer. And that either says a lot about this manga or just a whole lot about me and what I want in media, but either way Fire Punch gave it to me.