Jagaaaaaan (ジャガーン), 2017-2021, Kaneshiro, Muneyuki (Story), Nishida, Kensuke (Art), Big Comic Spirits

STORY: 4

Meet Jagasaki, an average manga hero, who gets to lead a fight against humans that turn into monsters because of their overwhelming desires. Here’s a series that starts strong.. and then quite suddenly turns mediocre with a plot that becomes boring and predictable.

Jagaaaaaan is a seinen (for adults) title with horror and sex, but what spoils the manga is that the storyline follows a very cliched shonen (for kids) progression: hero gets stronger along with the enemies, each battle to the death has the characters have a conversation like if they were sitting having some coffee, and of course power-ups appear when the fight seems over. Some enemies are even not far from telling you how their ability functions so that you can beat them, how nice.
Near the end, the story becomes especially bad and we get to the point of caricature with the hero having to go through a ‘dungeon’, and defeat sub-bosses like in a video game before reaching the final boss for an annoyingly long fight.

ART: 7

Very solid at times: backgrounds, objects, characters.. everything is well rendered and digital techniques are abundantly used without getting in the way. But the quality is also wildly fluctuating, it almost feels like the author is leaving assistants do everything in some chapters. Expect an edgy start with details and a cleaner, US-comic influenced, sometimes lazy art in the second half of the saga.

POLITICAL POTENTIAL: 4

Some questions here and there about desire, the use of violence and justice. And mostly, the usual overconfident nihilist antagonists that cannot stop blabbering about their evil projects even in the middle of a fight.

FEMINISM: 2

Despite the story rapidly downgrading to kids level with its shonen tropes, the level of sex is clearly for adults. Sadly, we get tons of softcore porn, abuse and rape, wrapped in a sleazy male gaze.
Male characters don’t have a lot of depth, but female characters are clearly being drawn as a body or stereotype first, and not much else. This is clearly evident with Jagasaki love interest, whose personality is totally inconsistent through the manga, just being whatever the scenario needs her to be in order to support the hero.
The only female character that does get a bit of her own story time and development is actually.. a man that has entered the body of a girl. And her story is mostly having lots of sex. I think that says a lot about the author’s interest in women.

CONCLUSION: 4/10

Many readers thought of titles like “Parasite” or “Gantz” when reading this manga and they are indeed better. You can skip Jagaaaaaan, no woooooorries.