Howdy and welcome to my read-through of Chapter 151: Zombie and Demon in which we’re finally on the summit, and the boys become their best selves.

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Zombie and Demon Summary

A Super Cool Dark Zombie?

Picking up directly from the previous chapter, Eiji announces his intention to make a super cool dark hero. Yujiro wants to know if Eiji has created any storyboards. Nope, but Eiji will have them in a day or so. Yujiro’s surprised by the choice; it doesn’t strike him as a typical shonen manga idea. He wonders what the main character will be like.

Eiji, characteristically zany lets him know it will be a ZOMBIE!

He’s got the heart of a human, however. It’s going to be about the Zombie getting revenge on the person who turned him into a zombie in the first place. He’s going to focus the conflict on the people who hate zombies. The MC even loves a human girl.

Yujiro points out he’s not a full zombie if he has a human heart. That’s right, his goal is to become a real human again. The heroine wants to help him reach his dreams.

Yujiro thinks it sounds like an American comic; there is worldwide knowledge of zombies, so it really boils down to the character design. Yujiro gives him approval to pursue this manga and start a one-shot.

Eiji is on it.

A New Series for the Boys Too?

The boys receive the news of Eiji’s new series and its timing. Shujin thinks they should also submit something before Sasaki departs. Saiko’s skeptical that they can do it, but Shujin came up with an idea based on Saiko’s character designs, and the editor-in-chief has high hopes for both of them. Shujin thinks it’d be great to show him something before he transfers. They could get a storyboard in time!

Saiko thinks about it: they now can juggle a one-shot in addition to their usual workload, and if they hurry, they can go face to face with Eiji.

Shujin reminds him that Eiji is also big time now, so he’s going to get anything he submits published immediately. If they come up with something as good or better, they can get the same chance.

Saiko’s surprised by the optimism, and Shujin reins it in.

The next day, Shujin announces that he has discovered their new main character among Saiko’s designs. He looks cool, kids will love him, and he is officially Kaya approved (the real seal of approval right there).

Saiko exposits that those are all good things since the editors stress the importance of characters being appealing to women as well (comment on this).

Saiko then asks how Shujin will use the character:

Demons

Shujin explains that the main character will get his powers from a demon.

O rlly.

…and that he’ll transform when he’s using the demon’s powers. Shujin will also need his human form before he’s transformed. Saiko’s shocked! The power of a demon *gasp*. The MC can transfer his thoughts directly into other people’s minds, and he gets stronger the more he uses these abilities. First, he’ll need to touch others to do it, but eventually he’ll be able to transmit thoughts telepathically. Starting with everyone in his classroom and then eventually with everyone within a 100-meter radius.

Saiko thinks it’s right up Shujin’s alley.

Shujin continues: the MC is a smart yet ignorant high school student who is convinced his world view is the right way and the only right way. He’s a good person; he’s believes the world would be more just if only everyone thought like him.

O rlly.

Shujin’s banking on the egocentrism of youngsters to make that a relatable impulse. But it will also cause the readers to ask, “Is he right or wrong?” he’s brainwashing people, but in the name of justice.

O rlly. Got any apples too, SHujin?

Saiko’s on board.

At a certain point, other people are going to pick up on his activities, and the police will get involved. But they’re going o struggle finding the guy since the closer the get the more likely they are to get brainwashed.

(lol)

Siako takes a beat to consider. Shujin is confident in the idea, but wants Saiko’s thoughts: Saiko has faith in Shujin if Shujin has faith in the idea. Shujin asks Saiko to draw cool-looking characters, and he’ll use them to come up with more ideas.

Saiko is going to make the guys’ demon form even cooler, keeping the premise in mind. His human form, too. Shujin also wants a design for the demon that helps the character out. That will make the story have truly good fantasy elements. The demon’s goal will be to end humanity.

Oh great.

And of course, make the heroine an innocent girl who falls victim to the MC.

Saiko confirms that only three characters are set in stone for now; Shujin confirms and runs home to think up some more ideas. Saiko warns him not to slack on PCP.

On his own, Saiko reviews the character design and wonders if they can really work with a dark hero granted a demon’s powers. He’s unsure.

Saiko gets started on the design, wondering what color palette to use for the character as he starts drawing. He mulls over all the conceits they want to hit: cult, battle, mainstream and, surprisingly, he goes for the pile of jump in the corner.

He pulls out Nanamine’s one-shot and thinks about Detective Trap, and the World is All About Money and Intelligence. He has an epiphany

He calls Shujin and makes a request: make this series as heartless as he can. Shujin’s concerned about their anime possibilities, but Saiko doesn’t want them to think about that for the time being. Hattori will assist in making it palatable for jump. Just go hard and brutal. Make the character insane, like he could kill anyone he doesn’t like.

Shujin tries to slow Saiko down: they don’t want him to be evil, they want him to be a dark hero. Saiko insists that they make him heartless. Shujin gives up

Amazing One-Shot

At Eiji Co., Ltd., Yujiro asks if Eiji finished the storyboard: Eiji did; he always gets it done fast once he’s in the zone. Yujiro’s skeptical as he reviews the zombie idea and takes as look.

Eiji jumps into character design mode, now dressed as a zombie. Even if he’s a zombie, he needs some pizzazz. Never change Nizuma.

Yujiro is pleased to find the story is relatively straightforward to follow and that Eiji hasn’t lost his knack for keeping things interesting; he contrasts Eiji’s approach to Ashirogi, who would have gone more complex, although that’s part of their appeal.

Yujiro gest sucked in by the storyboard and praises Eiji: he was skeptical about the idea of zombies but this manga is great. The battle against zombies in particular is incredible.

Eiji reminds Yujiro that the MC is part zombie and a traitor.

Yujiro’s even more shocked by the emotional depth of it: it has a drama that Crow always lacked. He looks zombie, but feels human.

Yujiro particularly loves a panel of zombies popping out of the ground:

He thinks Eiji is a true genius and the only one who could have come up with this work.

Something more

Shujin waits for Saiko’s assessment. It’s heartless; the MC is pretty messed up. Shujin freaks out since the MC is supposed to be… the MC. Saiko agrees.

When Shujin asks for Clarification, Saiko hands him a new character design: The Demon of Justice. Shujin is bowled over by the super cool character design and asks what the deal is.

Saiko’s been thinking: they lost to Eiji in Akamaru with The Wold is All About Money and Intelligence because Crow was a mainstream battle story

PCP still hasn’t hit number one despite going on for years now and they never managed to beat Crow with it anyway. Same for Detective Trap. Saiko figured out why after reading Beauty and the Billions: they’ve hit their ceiling of success.

Shujin’s shocked by the about face on Saiko’s part: they were all in on the cult hit as a way to the top! Saiko agrees that that is their wheelhouse, but they need something more if they’re ever going to beat Eiji. And Saiko has just the solution: a boy who uses his powers for evil, and one who uses them for good.

TWO MAIN CHARACTERS. OH SHIT. OH SHIT.

Saiko had the idea while drawing the character designs for the evil character. If there is a black demon of evil, then there would necessarily be a white demon who fights for good and justice.

With this central battle, they will have the mainstream component that their story has always been missing; they can break past their limits. Jump Manga is always about good vs evil. Nanamine never put that quality into his works. Neither have they.

This is a shonen manga and the readers have an expectation of Justice and Friendship; they want something uplifting which is something they’ll never provide as long as they go the way they have.

WOOOOOO

Saiko continues: Hattori has convinced them that cult hits are their thing, and Eiji has also consistently highlighted that as their strength. That’s what they’ve always done, but if they can combine their usual story with a righteous hero, then they’ll have something truly mainstream. They are att he level now where they can pull this off. How long have they been doing this? 7 years?

It’s time to push beyond their limits of cult-hits. Shujin considers adding a righteous hero to make something mainstream.

Shujin pieces it together: that’s why Saiko wanted him to write the most heartless thing he could, so that the audience will be able to accept the dark hero’s evil beyond doubt.

Shujin sees a problem: how will the good demon fight the other demon. Saiko’s answer is simple: the same ability, or the reverse of the main ability.

Shujin sees the light-or the white, as the case may be-and he also realizes that because it will be both a cult story and a battle manga, that means they can get some leverage to use serious humor as well.

A battle of ideals between the brainwashed. A battle between humans. The ultimate war between two demons. They can have as many battle scenes at they want and the victor is the truly righteous one.

I AM SO AMPED UP HOLYSHIT.

It’s what shonen manga is all about

Meat is back on the menu, boys.

Shujin’s enthusiasm for the story has skyrocketed as has the story’s potential. He thanks Saiko for the idea. It’s going to be great. They decide to use this idea to take on Eiji.

After a moment, Shujin pauses to reflect that, for once, they did a mainstream battle manga after all.

Saiko agrees, but he comes upon a great realization: they need to stop thinking in terms of mainstream and cult hits. He concludes that any jump managaka would eventually reach this point and they didn’t take any detours.

Not only that they’ve grown by trial and error; they’ve got all they learned and they’ve made it this far. They’re making something only they can make.

They will make a mainstream battle Muto Ashirogi style.

And on that glorious note, the chapter concludes:

Zombie and Demon

I. FUCKING. CALLED. IT.

Yeahhhhhhhhhh boiiiii. I said it in Chapter 1 and 150 chapters laters Im fucking vindicated. Half of my predictions were wrong as fuck and I don’t give a single solitary shit my guys.

I WAS RIGHT. I WAS RIGHT. FUCK YEAH.

Okay, wait, let me take a beat to just…relish this incredible chapter. We’ve been on a fucking tear lately with good chapters, and this one maybe one of the greatest.

And the reason it’s so great is why Bakuman is so great as a series, but it really ties to the thing I mentioned during the creation of PCP about 60+ chapters ago: the narrative equation.

While I will admit that I am not great at predicting minutiae of a story, I am usually pretty solid on predicting larger beats within a narrative; I often miss key details, and get some stuff wildly wrong. However, I don’t delve deeply into speculation. I read these things for entertainment and information, but I don’t get bogged down in every single panel, trying to break it down piece by piece to make the most accurate prediction. I just don’t engage with stories that way.

But given what I knew of this story, it was fairly obvious where this was going to go. And now we’re here, and it felt premature to introduce the cult thing all the way back in chapter like…10 when they were in the Akamaru Jump arc, but it actually works as decent foreshadowing. Which is fine by me. Because I said it then, too.

But GODDAMN SWEET VINDICATION BABY.

And I know I’m going to make a series of other incorrect predictions. Still, honestly, half the fun of the read-throughs for the audience, at least when I’m the consumer of this kind of content and not the creator, is watching the person engaging with the content react to something you know all the beats to. There is something uniquely satisfying about hearing what they get right, and what they get hilariously and comically wrong

Just like Bakuman‘s gimmick is ways to beat other people with manga, PCP is about perfect crimes. Read-throughs are about the ability to make the act of engaging with a story entertaining, and predicting its outcome as a new reader.

BUT THIS TIME I FUCKING DID IT.

Alright, I’m done. I swear.

Anyway, we should also acknowledge how on the nose this idea is as a riff on Death Note. Down to the demons and the morally dubious lead. I audibly cracked up in the ramen shop where I read this chapter when I was reading it. But I also had a huge shit eating grin on my face when I read it too because:

The Obvious Work Around and The Peak Meta-fictional Victory

So I just rode the high of knowing that the final battle has sstarted officially with this one-shot being written and talked about after…what, 40 chapters of building up that the boys were working on it.

But I also love that their solution to their problem of being bad at battle manga is not to write a battle manga, but to write a story in which there is good vs. evil with sci-fi elements which then, after all is said and done, boils down to a type of battling.

And what I love particularly about the way it’s described is that I can easily visualize how they plan to implement battles, even when the battles are not directly between the two characters, but are actually a series of proxy battles between other people caught in the web of the story. You know, like Bakuman.

Dun dun dunnnnn.

Yeah, I think the thing I love most about Saiko’s revelation – aside from the fact that it is Saiko who comes in with the clutch here – is that the series is drawing a pretty obvious parallel to its own narrative setup. Don’t have one hero, have two! And make one of them a white haired character who is the opposite of the dark haired character.

Sounds familiar?

While obviously Shujin and Saiko are not actually morally dubious – they’re basically cinnamon rolls, well, Saiko more than Shujin in this regard – they are opposing parts that create a whole that has opposing color schemes in their character design.

And they fight proxy battles through manga rather than duking it out with their fists, so there are still battles.

It’s not a 1:1 metafictional twist – Nizuma is a closer parallel and even that’s not totally accurate, but it’s pretty close all things considered when this series is so obvious with its metafiction, it practically begs you to read every interaction through that lens.

I am so happy, and I will also say:

Nanamine’s Role

I think the pièce de résistance in the way the equation of this whole story comes together, through Nanamine’s failures = and to some degree, his character, is a masterstroke of showing the creative process in a unique, highly memorable way.

I’ll admit, when I read the chapter initially, I missed the fact that Saiko was reading Beauty and the Billions when he hit his inspiration, but in recapping it, it became so much more obvious that the inspiration for the darkness – the heartlessness – is a product of their interactiosn with Nanamine and also the brutality of his own storytelling.

They’re using their dark Light Yagami type to come up with inspiration for their technically not Light Yagami dark hero. I am all for it.

And it also shows a genuinely masterful threading of several threads that have been building over the course of the story. Everything is satisfyingly slotting into place for the endgame of the story

Which includes

Eiji’s New Series

I’m going to be honest, I’m not sold on the zombie premise, at least not as it has been advertised. Buttttt, I think the choice for Eiji to go the zombie route – including dressing up like a zombie for his manga – speaks to the fact that he’s going this route.

And it reminds me of Eiichiro Oda and One Piece.

I wasn’t initially sold on the Pirates premise. I think that parallel is meant to be there. A genre idea that has a lot of popularity, but is not he first thing you think of when you think “Oh that sounds like a great manga idea” but as you’re sucked into the story, you see the sheer imagination of the author and realize it’s much more than a pirate story.

I can totally see Eiji’s character paying homage to Oda’s pirate manga by having a similarly off-kilter premise that totally works as you read through it and it has significant emotional depth.

I also loved that Yujiro noticed that Eiji’s writing has deepened emotionally in a way that wasn’t present in Crow. It’s a nice reminder that even peoplewho are good at their craft can always get better at what they are doing. It also really highlights the potential reference to One Piece and how much of a challenge the boys are going to face.

Which makes me retroactively like the ending of Crow arc signifciantly more than I did at the time. I thought it was going to be the final battle, but it makes more sense that we finally have the boys going toe to toe with Eiji in this way, with this story.

Which, I should mention, is another huge feat:

My Own Intuition

So one of the things I’ve cultivated over my time reading stories is a feeling of “Rightness” for lack of a better word. It’s a form of intuition in which the story’s components slot into place at the right time and right place to work, for lack of a better word. This is something that a lot of storytellers cultivate. This growing sixth sense that something is not working on its face, but when it’s not working in a story and you trust the writer, it’s because there is more to come.

And I think that’s why I can appreciate that while I was fully sold on the notion of Eiji v. Ashirogi being in the 130s, I still didnt’ feel one hundred percent like PCP is meant to beat Eiji

Because I think that, even though PCP sounds like a great idea, it doesn’t sound like an idea so good and so powerful that it transcends itself and becomes greater than the sum of its parts. And what the final battle entails is not just being popular, but being mega popular. Like, becoming a staple of the genre and having the astronomic blowup that everyone knows can happen, but usually don’t get.

And as I’ve written stories, I know when my story has legs to it in a special way. It’s a cutting feeling, a sharpness. A clarity that when you read the text, you feel acutely. And when you read a really good story, you know what I’m talking about. The it factor that I’ve mentioned in the past.

I’ve finally written a few screenplays like that. So when I heard the story they’re going with – aside from knowing the Death Note connection – it also felt like they’d hit that point where they’re going to boil over into something huge. They’ve finally got a legitimate hit on their hands that is a hit from the word go.

It’s a special feeling. And I get the same feeling from Zombie idea. That sense of clarity, where the premise is good enough to transcend itself.

And for Ohba to be able to communicate all of that through the way his characters act, and patiently biding his time narratively, so that when they’re really confident and they hit upon he idea that’s going to propel them to the stars, it’s a powerfully satisfying feeling.

And I love that the final component of their readiness doesn’t come from Hattori, or Eiji, or anyone else they look up to – aside from wanting to please Sasaki.

The Boys Have Self-Actualized

This is the thing I love about this moment the most. Not a lot happened in this chapter compared to many others, but it revealed something that the boys have been building to since the series began.

All stories are fundamentally equations that show us how Protagonist + Goal + Obstacles + Gimmick = Ending. And the ending that’s always been envisioned by this series is that the two become mangaka who are mega successful with a cult type story that has broad appeal.

And what actually works about this moment is not just this moment, but that *almost* every other arc has contributed to them actualizing themselves and rejecting the need for the approval of their editors, or their rivals. Through trial, error, and taking every lesson that has come their way over their almost 8 years of writing manga, they have improved to the point where this moment feels like a natural culmination of all their other lessons.

The equation has finally created what it has been setting up the entire time. From serious humor, to drawing fast, to knowing who you are.

So when Saiko finally rejects the label that he has internalized, it’s powerful. He doesn’t need to be a cult-hit because that’s what’s likely to bring him success: he can be mainstream on his own terms. And in fact, it’s his duty as someone aiming for the top to find that balance within himself.

And I buy that he’s going to do so and succeed as a result of it.

And I’m in a similar space. I’m not quite there, yet. But I’m achingly close. The songs I’m writing, the scripts I’m writing, they are who I am, but they get a little closer to that balance. It feels like seeing myself a bit.

But it’s all them, and they’ve earned this moment.

I’m so excited for the final 25 chapters, so fucking excited.

I hope you are too

Until next time,

Peace