Black Torch review: Chainsaw Man for cat people — with ninjas
Overview & Key Takeaways
The canceled manga that debuted before Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen finally gets an anime blending supernatural action, ninjas, and one cool cat.
By the end of the first episode, I raised my eyebrows in shock. The protagonist, a teenage punk, dies at the hands of a demon. His demon pet fuses with him to save his life, thus transforming him into a unique hybrid. Suddenly, this duo becomes the most powerful thing on the planet. Demons want to kill him. A clandestine government agency wants to recruit him. Most surprising of all, he's totally along for the ride.
Black Torch’s protagonist, Jiro Azuma, is not Denji from Chainsaw Man, but the many parallels between the two stories are impossible to ignore. The core gimmick and story trajectory share the same core premise. The image of Rago, a mononoke (evil spirit), filling a hole in the center of Jiro’s chest is virtually identical to Pochita replacing Denji’s heart. And yet, Black Torch is far from a modern shonen copycat. In fact, the opposite is true. Black Torch predates not just Chainsaw Man, but Jujutsu Kaisen and Kaiju No. 8 as well. In many ways, it kickstarted modern supernatural shonen as the biggest trend in manga and anime.
Black Torch is also very much a story for cat people. Whereas the almighty Pochita (the Chainsaw Devil) assumes the form of a chubby dog that we never hear from again, Rago is a lovably sassy black cat who never shuts up. So if you love Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service, Luna from Sailor Moon, Mao from Darker than Black, or even Salem from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, then you’ll delight in seeing Rago positioned as an ancient spirit with overwhelming power who casually swears at our protagonist while grooming his ears. Rago is a cute little kitty with the personality of a grumpy warlord. He’s also not a mascot or simple companion, but more of a foulmouthed partner and antihero. That dynamic alone makes Black Torch stand out from the similar series that came after it.
"I'm no one's property, wacko." is a very Rago thing to say.
Image: VIZ Media
Tsuyoshi Takaki's Black Torch began serialization in Jump Square in December 2016, but it was canceled after five volumes due to lackluster sales and readership. Ironically, many of the ideas that made it unique went on to become hallmarks of shonen's biggest hits a few years later: Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man both debuted in 2018, and Kaiju No. 8 began in 2020. They all have nuanced differences — but each protagonist fuses with some kind of monster and uses their newfound power to fight other monsters as part of some kind of organization. That makes it easy to draw parallels between these four series in terms of tropes and various character archetypes.
Another interesting and fun wrinkle: Almost every character we meet in Black Torch, including Jiro himself, hails from a long line of ninjas and is well-trained in the art of ninjutsu. He’s the furthest thing from just a random punk, even more so because he can talk to animals, which is how he bonds with Rago to begin with.
While Black Torch’s stakes are grave, bordering on the apocalyptic, there’s so much levity to be found in Jiro’s banter with Rago or the way he casually chats up pigeons. His childhood dog, Nachi, was like a mother to him. All the neighborhood cats know him well. He was bullied by his fellow humans as a child for talking to animals all the time. But that made him more resilient. But the phenomenon also gave him an unusually strong sense of empathy. In this, Black Torch earns Jiro’s unyielding altruism.
Image: VIZ Media
Black Torch began airing on July 4 with new episodes arriving on Crunchyroll weekly. So far, the first three episodes have covered roughly the first five or so chapters of the manga. The 12-episode season should be able to cover all 19 chapters of the original series, but Tsuyoshi Takaki has been heavily involved with the anime adaptation supervising setting and storyboards, describing it as "something even better" that still respects his original story. While the anime hasn’t really diverged from the manga so far, his close involvement has me hopeful that it could expand beyond the prematurely canceled source material.
Even if that doesn’t happen, Black Torch remains an excellent anime to watch while we all wait for more Kaiju No. 8, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Chainsaw Man.
New Black Torch episodes release weekly on Crunchyroll on Saturdays at 9 a.m. ET.
