What is it about recent big shonen hits that involve their protagonists engaging in cannibalism? My Hero Academia was bad enough, with Izuku Midoriya inheriting All Might's quirk by ingesting his hair. Then comes Jujutsu Kaisen's Yuji Itadori gobbling down Ryomen Sukuna's mummified finger to gain unbelievable Jujutsu powers. What next? A protagonist eating babies to gain immortality? (No – that's Baba Yaga, it's been done.)

What would morph into Jujutsu Kaisen (referred to as JJK from now on) as we now know it first began as 2017's four-chapter prelude, Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical School, published in Jump Giga. This was positively received, so author Gege Akutami was requested by his editors to expand his concepts into an ongoing series, JJK, which ran in Weekly Shonen Jump for a total of 30 collected volumes between 2018 and 2024. Up to volume 28 is currently available in print in English; the Shonen Jump app includes those translated chapters, which will eventually comprise volumes 29 and 30, to be published in print form next year. This review will encompass the entire story, including JJK 0 – the retroactively re-named prelude.

JJK's popularity exploded following studio MAPPA's rapturously received 2020 anime adaptation, which covered up to partway through volume eight, followed by 2021's movie adaptation of the prelude volume, and 2023's season two, adapting up to the first half of volume sixteen. The upcoming third season looks to adapt the “Culling Game” arc over two split cours, leaving the finale arc, I assume, for a likely fourth and final season. Readers willing to brave the 31-volume manga series can already learn how the story ends. But without MAPPA's incredible action animation, how does this version of the story fare?

I'll be honest, taken as a whole, JJK's manga doesn't hold up well at all, and as a fan of the early material, I'm bitterly disappointed. I've concluded that JJK 0, rough as it is, is probably the best, most complete story within the franchise. The prelude's protagonist, Yuta Okkotsu, is more reserved and less immediately likable than main series lead Yuji Itadori, but the central relationship between Yuta and the deceased/cursed Rika gives the story emotional stakes that never return during later story arcs. Over four longer chapters, their story has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, with few distractions along the way.

The material adapted by JJK's first anime season is also mostly very good. Yuji's a fun character, as are his two first-year Jujutsu High classmates, Megumi Fushiguro and Nobara Kugisaki. They have great chemistry together, and each of their individual fighting styles reflects their personalities. I love that Nobabara's chosen weaponry is a hammer and nails – both blunt and pointed at the same time. Megumi's not much of a hand-to-hand combatant, so he summons really cool cursed animal familiars using shadow hand gestures. Anything involving either of these two is almost always fun.

JJK 0's supporting cast show up soon enough, too, from cursed speech user Toge Inumaki, who can't speak using words other than rice ball ingredients, to cursed sword-wielder Maki Zen'in with her horrible family problems, to Panda, who, well… is a panda. These guys are also all great. The problem is that JJK can't help but cram its cast full of hundreds more characters, all with incredibly intricate cursed fighting styles that interact with one another in increasingly baroque, impenetrable ways.

The first signs of trouble come during the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event Team Battle arc, which is the story's first extended battle arc. We meet a bunch more characters from a rival Jujutsu school, only some of whom really achieve anything in the wider story. Most notable is Mai Zen'in, Maki's sister, and Aoi Todo, whose bizarre big brother-esque relationship with Yuji remains a source of much-needed humor throughout the rest of the manga. The rest of them, though… I struggled to keep track of who they were and why I should care.

The short Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arcs in volumes eight and nine are a significant return to form, a flashback story focusing on breakout teacher character Satoru Gojo and his friendship with JJK 0 antagonist Suguru Geto. We receive some tantalizing background information about the Jujutsu world, and another taut story with a powerful emotional core that almost equals the prelude arc. Sadly, from this point on, it's all downhill.

Before the anime's second season, fans hyped up the importance of the Shibuya Incident arc. I mostly found that eighteen-episode chunk of the anime to be overlong and boring. Despite the incredible action animation, I tired of the constant fights and lack of tangible plot or character development. It's even worse in the manga. This arc (not including an interstitial side chapter) is 53 chapters long. Yes, it ran as a weekly manga for over a year. I can't imagine the frustration I would have felt reading this week to week. Reading it all in one sitting, as I did for this review, was exhausting enough. It's nothing but one fight after another, a few dramatic deaths and plot twists along the way make it just about worthwhile, but it's during this arc that author Akutami starts to get lost in his own Domain Expansion.

What begins as a few side notes explaining characters' cursed fighting techniques spills over into the manga panels, infecting the story with what can only be described as a cursed form of the very worst Star Trek-style technobabble. Huge long screeds of text explaining in intricate detail about why one technique nullifies another, except in a certain situation where something else happens… is profoundly boring, no matter how visceral and kinetic the fight scenes. This tendency to overburden the reader with pointlessly ancillary information only worsens throughout the subsequent Culling Game and final arc, to the point where the story becomes impenetrably incoherent to anyone without a PhD in Akutami's fictional curse mechanics. The man even employs legal and scientific experts to make sure his jargon makes some kind of real-world sense. I don't know who this kind of writing is for, but it's absolutely not for me.

I don't deny that the author has a fantastic imagination, brimming with multitudinous ideas for how all of his countless characters can beat seven hells out of one another in infinitely complex ways, but at some point, it starts to feel like a kid bashing his favorite action figures together and narrating the fights in the most needlessly convoluted way possible.

Sadly, the manga devolves into chapter after chapter of this, even when the later arcs do manage to introduce fun characters with cool skills. They're drowned beneath an onslaught of extended fighting bouts between characters with minimal connection to the main story. When I need to consult a wiki to keep up with characters introduced only a volume or two previously, there's a problem with character and concept overload.

What's really frustrating is that underneath all of this unnecessary detritus, there's a great story screaming to be let out. Yuta's re-introduction during the Culling Game arc is great… and then he disappears from the narrative for ages, only to return later for some awesome late-story action. Yuji's links to the main antagonist and to the cursed character Choso are super-interesting, but Akutami doesn't seem that interested in developing these plot points beyond surface level. Some later plot twists are fantastic, but lose impact because they're buried under stacks of garbage.

Oddly, the main female character, Nobara, suffers an almost identical fate to MHA Vigilantes' Pop Step, removing her from the action almost entirely in the second half of the story. She suffers a horribly cruel twist, mainly for the sake of motivating Yuji. That's slightly yikes plotting right there, though a later, very important scene does try to justify keeping her out of the main final battle.

JJK could have done with far more control on the editorial side to keep the author focused on telling a decent story, without overwhelming his readers with information that could have been kept to a set of optional end notes. The artwork suffers too, especially towards the end, as it gets extremely rushed and loose at times. Often, I struggled to tell characters apart, which isn't ideal when the cast becomes so unfeasibly huge.

No doubt MAPPA will elevate the manga to the level of profound action spectacle with its upcoming Culling Game anime adaptation, but it will likely suffer from many of the same flaws as the Shibuya Arc anime. JJK, the manga is an exhausting read with a few shining spots of brilliance surrounded by turgid over-explanation and never-ending fights. Ultimately, the very definition of a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.