This came straight from nowhere for a lot of people and right out of a mausoleum for me. I wrote about BLACK TORCH’s lifespan in October 2023 and I faintly recall doing it out of jealousy over a similar manga that debuted the same year it ended.
Just in case it’s clear as mud, I’m not asking for Chainsaw Man to get buried under a keystone shaped burial mound. It earned its place in animanga and I have come around. I am caught up to the manga after all. At the time, I had already accepted that BLACK TORCH had been laid to rest for good, but then I hear through the grapevine that it’s been greenlit for an anime adaptation.
Channel: vizmedia
On the one hand: what the f[guitar riff]k? But on the other hand: It’s not the first time an anime was greenlit from the cutting room floor. Yoshitoshi Abe was able to get Haibane Renmei onto the silver screen; so why can’t Tsuyoshi Takaki?
Now, having written in disappointed praise about BLACK TORCH in the past and snidely remarked at Chainsaw Man’s expense in the process, does this in any way indicate that I’m happy BT was given an anime adaptation? Yes/no. It’s a spark on the stove that caught my eye, but isn’t worth exploring any further until we get more information. So far, we only have the teaser linked above, the article on Crunchyroll which itself is sparsely detailed, whatever the other outlets have to say about the news and the Wikipedia article which reflects the updates.
To find out a little more at the time of writing, I learned that the studio animating it was established in 2021 as a subidiary of another company called HIKE. 100studio, romanized as One Double O, is gonna spearhead the anime adaptation whenever that will be. Based on the teaser, I say that it’s 10% complete. It’ll come out either in the 4th quarter of this year or the 1st or 2nd quarter of 2026 if luck is on our side. As for the studio itself, while can’t speak for anyone else, I just now learned about this studio who apparently produced the series Quality Assurance in Another World. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No idea what to make of that, nor even this act of necromancy. But now I have something else to add to my watchlist.
Regular readers know the nature of this blog: obscure, unheard of, niche unsung series; and occasionally something popular that’s ongoing. Following that trend, I bring to you a manga that not only had a small fanbase for its duration, but was also cancelled before it could spread its wings and take proper flight: Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki
I caught onto this quite early in 2017. It’s first chapter was included in a manga published by Viz Media about upcoming series at the time, and fun fact: this same manga showcase series had the first chapter of Demon Slayer in it.
Black Torch is about a young man named Jiro Azuma, a street punk who has the gift of Eliza Thornberry — talking to animals. One day, he meats a Mononoke taking the form of a black cat called Rago who tells him (with a cynical tone) that there are many more Mononoke like him who exist to cause chaos in the world. One of them mortally wounds Jiro and Rago possesses the boy, bringing him back to life and they defeat the Mononoke that killed him, only for he and Rago to be subdued by a special operations unit trained in shinobi martial arts for the purpose of tracking and eliminating evil Mononoke.
There’s some nuance to the plot. In Japanese folklore, Mononoke are perceived the same way as demons here in the West; wicked creatures who lurk in the dark and take possession of the innocent. The concept is similar in Japan, though in Black Torch, as seen in Rago and one or two other characters, not all Mononoke are pure evil. And for Rago’s case, well, he’s a cat and I think cat owners can relate to this aspect.
So let’s rewind and assess that for a bit. A demon that takes the shape of a household pet takes possession of an adolescent after he dies in a violent manner, and both the demon and the young man are recruited into a special division of demon hunters whose mission is to destroy the evil demons, sometimes working with the good ones or those not powerful enough to be a world-ending threat. Where have I heard that plot before?
You can chalk this up more so to coincidence than an outright ripoff of sorts. Black Torch ran for five volumes between December 2016 and March 2018. CSM debuted December 2018 and is still running today. No doubt you’ve seen what the community regards as season 1 of the anime. I know I did. 12 different ending themes; imagine being the accountant for MAPPA.
It’s easy to make it look like I’m jealous that a manga that tried this first failed while another one succeeded, but delving deeper into the Black Torch manga reveals why. It was more than just the framework of the manga. Yonks ago, I learned that a dispute between Takaki and the publisher were why his manga was axed so early in its run. In my research for this post, I found that online discourse has its own opinions for why the manga suffered. In animanga spaces around forums like Reddit, some believe that it was trying to copy Bleach but was about a decade late and a yen short. Others thought it was a case of style over substance. And a third opinion, by this blog called Tower City Media Video, proclaims that the second biggest killer was pacing. I’d like to go over these points, though I won’t be talking about the publication issue since most of the time that stuff is handled away from public eyes, presumably to keep the press from ruining an ongoing process.
It’s not like there’s no market for edgy manga. Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man and even Black Torch have that approach among others, but they all do it differently. Chainsaw Man does it by having the protagonist be an orphan with missing limbs thanks to his deadbeat dad’s irresponsible debt to the Yakuza, and when the boy can’t make a dent in that he’s chopped into pieces until best boy Pochita possesses and revives those pieces. Black Torch goes more for a rug pull of sorts. Jiro lives with his grandfather who generally has the strength of other old men in manga like Golden Kamuy’s Youichirou the Manslayer or Naruto’s Third Hokage. In fact, there’s a scene in the manga where Jiro is forced to fight his grandfather who plans to kill him and then end his own life for failing to protect his grandson from the Mononoke as well as letting a Mononoke possess him, only to walk it back as a test of conviction when Jiro fights back just as hard, as explained by this Screen Rant article.
As for style over substance, this one is a bit of a stretch for me personally. There’s no shortage of good looking series that don’t have a lot beneath the surface, but that’s not a problem I recall from Black Torch in particular. Really, without the space needed to take flight, the hints that there was a deeper story than we realize are mostly lost. I mentioned earlier that it shows that this unit of shinobi is willing to work with some of the Mononoke so long as they’re harmless, but that may also hint at a sort of mutual exchange between unlikely partners. But now that the manga’s been long cancelled, who knows whether that’s the case?
The final one by Tower City Media about turtle pacing was something I didn’t notice at first, but after reading that article and looking back, if the manga could’ve done better to pick up the pace, it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled so soon, if at all. Rago the cat isn’t the only animal Jiro talks with. In the beginning, he used to have a dog that he often spoke with while washing her, and I recall in the third volume that while he was traipsing about the woods, he spoke with a snake.
I joke, but Orochimaru wouldn’t look all that out of place in a manga like this.
If any of these points are true or there’s another factor contributing to Black Torch’s cancellation, then what may have helped Takaki would’ve been to trim the fat, get a move on with the pacing, and add more character to the characters. Jiro Azuma does well enough to make himself interesting, but he couldn’t carry the manga by himself, and going back to coincidences between Black Torch and Chainsaw Man, both had their own version of the super serious stoic type, but thankfully for CSM, Aki wasn’t copy-pasted twelve times over.
For all of Black Torch’s faults, it was at least able to end with a whimper as opposed to a bang. At least it didn’t run around like a headless chicken trying to end with an overdue bang. When I bought the manga during college, Viz charged $10 per volume up from $8 from around 15 years ago, and at five volumes, $50 plus tax is cheap for a cancelled series compared to the 20-something box sets of Demon Slayer or the 72 volumes in triplicate box sets for the Naruto manga. But of course, if you want the story that did it better, it’s not too late to catch up on Chainsaw Man.
It’s a month divisible by 2 and for this month’s recommendation is Escapist Magazine.
Beginning as a video game journalism site by Nick Calandra in 2005, The Escapist has branched out into general media with classic series like Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition, Movie Bob’s the Big Picture and many more. Although they have a YouTube channel (linked above), they also have a website where their series are hosted before being made public on YouTube.
Opinions on Entertainment 