This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Engine Inspection presents Writer Tears.
This is part 5 of my coverage of the Kamen Rider manga by none other than the classic manga ka, Shotaro Ishinomori.
And I'm going to say right off the bat, I really liked this episode, this chapter, this section of the manga.
This focuses on Hayato Ichimonji because of spoilers that I didn't want to talk about too much last time when I was reviewing part 4.
Hayato Chimonji, not Takeshi Hango, takes the main stage for this section of the manga.
And I'll get to that in a minute because right now I want to talk about, I want to kind of get out of the way talking about the peak drama and the peak art from this manga.
So the peak drama, I chose this page where, again, spoilers, Ichimonji is fighting a man, I'll just put it this way.
Ichimonji is fighting a man up on a cliff top where this woman, his childhood friend, is about to be thrown off as a part of his festival of sacrificing to the sea gods so that the fishing village will do well.
And it turns out that this man in a mask is none other than his father.
And the sequential art here is really great.
He cracks the guy, they've been fighting for a little while, him and other guys, he cracks him on the face in the mask with a, you know, writer chop type thing.
The mask splits apart, it breaks open.
Ichimonji's dad has a huge schnauz, his nose bursts out of the mask and then his father falls off of the cliff.
I believe his father dies, or lives, although it's inconclusive and he's very apologetic and very sad and very upset that his father is falling down this cliff, which is great.
But everything that had happened leading up to this with the interactions with his parents and with the village all give you this great sense of foreboding and then we have this very dramatic scene unfold there and the art behind it is pretty good too.
And then, you know, it's a small fishing village that Ichimonji is actually from and we get to see that played out because almost all the shocker, no, all the shocker kaijin or cyborgs featured in this section of the manga are actually aquatic.
There's fish people, there's a crab man, there's a shrimp man and there are also these crazy gigantic, they look to me gigantic, flying manta rays that have electric shocks very much amplified and there's even shark bombs, bomb sharks later on, which is sad because you get to see after they blow up it's just like a shark corpse and, you know, that's it.
Which is really awful that, you know, shockers using animals in that way.
But yeah, so that was my peak drama and then I have a little bit, I had a really, really hard time actually figuring out what the peak art example was for you.
And I want to get this out of the way and then blabber on for a few minutes and talk, not blabber on, but then for a few minutes just talk kind of fast and loose about the rest of what I thought of this, this edition of the manga.
It's probably the case that the actual best artwork in this is some of the stuff where Ichimonji is not transformed into the writer yet and he's fighting with crab man, because crab man is rendered really wonderfully, he has a great sense of motion, great sense of foreboding and in their fights and in their interactions with each other.
Like I said, the sense of motion is really great, like the cinematography is fantastic and you just feel like they are fighting, like they're going back and forth, like it's this dance of death that they're engaged in.
But my favorite artwork actually is these cutaways that we see, because for whatever reason in this section of the manga, Isshinomori decides to bless us with these cutaways of the writer and the writer's suit and we get all these interesting details on it.
So there's this great one of the mask, which is really beautifully rendered, I think. It's like a close up shot of his face and it's a cutaway.
And then there's a whole body shot, which actually now I think of it as the Isshinomori poster with Hongo standing in front of the cyclone and then it says stuff around him, it's like a grayish background, that's exactly what's pulled from this section of the manga, except there's not the cutaways showing the details of his suit and his powers and stuff and how the second skin of it powers him up and how apparently he can breathe for two hours in space or in vacuum with the, I don't know, the stuff, the air stored in the lung or whatever.
It's just super cool and it's got all this great information, all these great tidbits in there and it looks cool. It's a full body shot and it's not rendered as nicely as it could be.
We see nicer versions elsewhere, but it's pretty good, it does the job. I would give it, as far as the rendering itself, I'd give it like an 85%, but all this cool stuff it shows within it is awesome, versus the close up head shot where we get the cutaway to the eye.
I'd give that like a 99% as far as the quality of the art, so that was really cool.
But yeah, I want to go ahead and talk about the actual story as a whole because that is what I care about here, even if the visuals are awesome and do blow me away.
This is a visual medium so I figure I gotta talk about that for a good chunk of the time, but for the rest of the time I want to talk about the actual story that we got to see unfold in this section of the manga and I'll also get into spoilers about what happened with Takeshi Hongo and how he...
Well, and what happened with him.
Alright, so before I continue I want to make sure I talk about Ichi Monji, then Hongo, then some cool new stuff from the writer system that I didn't know about until this issue.
It's weird, I read this years ago, however many years ago when it originally came out, I bought it on Comixology and read the whole thing and I really liked it.
And then I don't remember a lot of the stuff that happens in this one and I peeked at the next section and I don't remember a lot of that.
So anyway, it's really interesting that Ichi Monji goes to his hometown, his fishing village.
I find it also interesting that Ichi Nomori is from a smishing village...
Fishing village? I can't remember what it's called right now, but anyway, he is, and that's kind of a cool thing.
But anyway, so Ichi Monji goes back home, it's like a ghost town, there's a very interesting, like oppressive, like sad, empty, hollow atmosphere there, and then it turns out, like, you know, Shocker, you know, trigger warning or whatever.
Shocker kills a dog! Like a dog gets decapitated by a crab man, I believe. And like, just all these people are living in terror, and his childhood friend, who I think he maybe been in love with as a kid or whatever, and his mom and dad, like, they hate him, and they're rejecting him and they're telling him to go away, and it turns out that it's all part of this...
They're using the town, the fishing village, of Ichi Monji, which I believe they're doing that on purpose to spite him, as a sample of a mind control thing, project, that Shocker has in mind because they want to subjugate all of humanity and turn them into cattle, right?
That's the idea. So, they utilize his town, and there's like, I don't know, there's this really interesting thing that's going on with him where, like, he knows the town, and he knows the people, but they're totally alien to him, and they're no longer who they used to be because of Shocker, and it kind of parallels him because he's no longer who he used to be because of Shocker, and, you know, his interactions with Chikichin Hongo have turned him into a different person.
Now he is the Kamen Rider, and they have a mission. He has a purpose to his life, and, like, he kind of has to, like, he can't go back home based on what's happened to him, and, like, Hongo's family is dead.
Tobi Tachibana is the only family he has left, and we get to see that, and we get to see the, you know, some of the staff that are working for him and stuff like that, and they, you know, seem to care about their boss or whatever, but it's not the same, and then Ichi Monji has his opportunity to go home.
It looks like he kills his dad, but we don't know. It's inconclusive, and for sure, like, his mom and his dad hate him because of what Shocker's done and because of how they're controlling him, and so does his childhood friend, and she tries to kill him.
She pulls out a whatever little dagger. What is it? Anyway, I don't know the Japanese name. It's okay. It's a short sword dagger type thing. Tonto, maybe? Anyway.
To try to kill him after they were trying to kill her, throwing her off the cliff to appease the Sea God, because she wouldn't listen to them, and she was, like, not being fully mind controlled, and it's just really interesting, all that personal dynamic, and it adds an element of tragedy to Ichi Monji.
We don't know much about him, but then seeing all this stuff, it really, you know, makes things kind of interesting and crazy for him.
Hongo, on the other hand, is a brain in a jar now, and he's communicating with Ichi Monji, and he can feel what Ichi Monji feels. He can see what he sees, and he has the sense of everything that he sees.
It's like they're the two-in-one Comenrater, the original two-in-one Comenrater, believe it or not, which is super interesting, but, you know, similar to the dynamic with, like, Shota and Philip from Comenrater Double, if you don't know, that's who I'm referring to when I say the two-in-one Comenrater.
Hongo has a better head on his shoulders, even though ironically he's a brain in a jar now, and he cautions Ichi Monji to not think he's invincible, to slow down and be careful, because he needs to protect his life and make sure that he survives so that they can continue the fight against shocker.
And Ichi Monji's kind of reckless, and there's this thing that Ichi Monji keeps saying, like, oh, it's easy for you to say, I'm the one who actually has to do this, you're just, you know, communicating with me, you're connected with me in this different way, and, you know, you're not the one at risk here, you're already, you know, risked, or whatever.
And your part of the story of being the one in danger is done, and now I'm the one bearing the brunt of that. And it's super interesting because it just, it, I don't know, it was funny, I was reading out loud to my kids, and I, they give, like, almost the god shocker, they call him, like, the way his text is, where it's like very square bubbles and very square, different kind of bold text, as opposed to like the more handwritten looking type text of the other characters.
So I gave Hongo, like, this kind of cold, emotional, more distant voice when I was voicing him in that, and that's kind of how I read it visually. And that's interesting because maybe there is a little bit of that robotic mechanical, inhuman aspect to him now that he's just the brain in the jar.
And it definitely, you get a, definitely a different vibe between the two of them, like they do have contrasting personalities, and you feel that, I just don't know if, you know, kind of cold mechanical detached is the right way to characterize Hongo in this, because he does care, and he, you know, wants Ichimonji to be safe, and he wants to fight Shocker for all the right reasons, all the right things.
It's just, I don't know, there's just something in the way it was presented to me, it just felt a little colder, a little different, a little distant, and that's interesting because, you know, Hongo was struggling with not being fully human, and now he's barely human, he's barely alive, like where's his soul, where's his heart?
He just doesn't have a heart or soul, he just has a brain, and that's kind of weird, but I mean, I still think technically the soul could be contained within the flesh, or whatever, whatever, even if it's a modicum of it, like the brain.
Gosh, I don't know, it's really interesting. I really like this though, like this is a lot of fun, I like the dynamism in the fights, the actions, very smooth, we see crazy stuff, like Ichimonji, you know, I'm calling this the subtitle of this review, is Kamen Swimmer, because he's swimming,
Kamen Rider's swimming through the water, and apparently he can swim in there for like up to two hours, because he's got air somehow in his lung system or whatever, you gotta look at the cutouts, I believe I'm posting it on the show notes at MJMunoz.com for you to see that, but like, it's super cool, he's swimming and he's like using like reverse turbo thruster or whatever, in order to like zoom through the water, and Hongo's like, don't do it too much, you're gonna use up all your energy, that's not good, and it's just, it's super cool, all the stuff that Ichimonji's doing, like I never expected to see Kamen Rider swimming around in the ocean and like doing it to some extent
Take care, this is MJ signing out.