8/25 Today in Angry People Powering Up

So yesterday I crammed in three franchises I couldn’t possibly summarize for people who haven’t read them. If you want me to summarize One Piece, you can burn in hell, ser. HunterXHunter is hard enough to summarize chapter to chapter. And the thought of Tokyo Ghoul makes me punch things when I’m at work. So today I’ll go over this week’s releases for three manga that are either early enough on to not confuse or easy enough to summarize in a couple sentences: Dr. Stone, Shokugeki no Soma, and The Promised Neverland.

Dr. Stone Chapter 24

This has been a huge surprise for me, in that it is fantastic, and its fantasticalness, which is now a word, can be easily summarized by this image from Chapter 20:

BRUH IT’S LIKE THEY MADE CIV 5 INTO A MANGA

LOOKIT IT. As someone who won’t play a boardgame unless there are at least 100 tiny cardboard pieces to it and has stared at Civilizations 4,5, and 6 for an amount of time that is nearly equal to my entire life? This could not excite me more.

Dr. Stone is set 3000 years in the future. Human civilization has been gone for a long time because of an apocalyptic event that occurred wherein everyone on the planet was turned to stone. 3000 years later our protagonist, Senkuu, awakens, ready to rebuild the world as a Kingdom of Science. His main adversary is a guy named Tsukasa who wants to reject science, as it most likely led to the apocalypse in the first place. Tsukasa’s plan is to go around breaking the statues of anyone over the age of 18 and to keep the world mostly organic.

The premise is great, but the real meat is in the chapter to chapter solutions Senkuu comes up with to solve the problems he faces… with SCIENCE. Senkuu is a walking science textbook, and he’s just managed to forge some iron (and ramen):

Senkuu on the right

This week this Chris Angel motherfucker shows up

He’s a mentalist (diediedie)

He’s a spy from Tsukasa’s kingdom of young people, but his allegiance is about as strong as an undercooked waffle. So Senkuu decides he’s going to lure this shitbag to the side of SCIENCE by creating a way to generate electricity: step one, a DYNAMO. Check this one out, you will not regret it.

The Promised Neverland Chapter 52

This one is about a group of orphans who lived a beautiful little life until three of them accidentally discovered that their orphanage is actually a farm where they are made to become hyper-intelligent so they can be “adopted” at age 13 and summarily have their brains consumed by these guys here:

Real Gourmands, These Guys

That puts a damper on things, but luckily these kids have been engineered to be smart as hell (smart brains are tastier, duh) and they formulate a plan to escape. After they escape they learn that not only are they just food for demons, the world outside isn’t even our world: they’re stuck in some crazy demon world over-run with monster plants and assholes. We pick up this week with them having escaped to a location given to them by some sort of resistance fighter named William Minerva. This is what that looks like:

Swank pad!

So the kids are TICKED. They spend the rest of the chapter trying to suss out the location of Mr. Minerva.

I go back and forth on Neverland. One week I love it, the next it falls flat. It’s definitely trying to be a ‘smart’ manga, a la Death Note, but it rarely manages to reach those heights. This one is still in its infancy, so it has room to grow, but it really needs to lay out a compelling narrative in the next couple months with the crew having finally located Minerva. If they don’t sink a hook in after they finally meet their mysterious benefactor, that’s the beginning of the end for a promising series.

Shokugeki no Soma Chapter 228

Shokugeki no Soma (known as Food Wars! over here for some reason) is a story about a guy named Soma who is attending the most L33T THE GREETEST EVAR culinary school in Japan and dominating people by feeding them food that makes their clothes explode off of them. It’s like Iron Chef meets anime, and it is fantastic.

Right now Soma is embroiled in a Shokugeki (basically an Iron Chef competition) with a group of JERKS called Central who have taken over their school (Totsuki Academy). On the line in this TEAM BATTLE is the future of the school. Central wants to make everyone learn just the best members of the school’s recipes (the best students in the school are the Elite Ten, because Elite Four is trademarked, yo), Soma’s group wants everyone to compete every day to allow for free creation of new foods.

Last week Soma’s team took a crushing defeat from Central, losing all three of their bouts:

Fuckin OWNED

But this week it is revealed that this was all part of some MASTER PLAN (sure, right, uh-huh) to weaken Central’s best members, and tomorrow three of our leads (Soma, Megumi, and Aldini) are gonna throw down, food style.

I just recently caught up with this one, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a ton of fun and the fan service dies down about 30 chapters in (or maybe it just ramps up the fan service with the male characters?). If you just want to read something fun, or you love cooking, this is a great choice.

THIS FOOD IS SO GREAT I FUCKING HATE SHIRTS NOW