The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Fabricant 100

What's It About? 

Ashibi Yao watched as his family was brutally killed by Fabricants, creatures who steal the body parts of humans in order to make themselves into the “ideal human.” Never wanting anyone else to suffer the way he has, he makes a deal with No. 100, the strongest Fabricant of all—he'll give her his body, but only if she promises to help him hunt down and stop every other Fabricant out there.

Fabricant 100 has a story and art by Daisuke Enoshima. English translation by Jan Mitsuko Cash. Lettering by Erika Terriquez. Published by Viz Media's Shonen Jump (April 22, 2025). Rated Teen.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris
Rating:

A horror-action manga by way of Shonen Jump always means I must ask exactly how horror it will be. "I need it to be a hundred times scarier than Frankenstein!" Daisuke Enoshima seems to have decided, on the solution to have a mad doctor unleash 100 Frankenstein's monsters, called "Fabricants" here, on the world with a hunger for other people's body parts. Hunting these modern Prometheuses (Promethei?) is a lead duo defined by a kid who had his whole family killed by a monster, so he teamed up with that monster to stop other monsters from killing other people. It attempts to be premised on truisms about making things safer and better for others in the world motivated by immutable human empathy for others. But Fabricant 100 doesn't seem super interested in interrogating its inherent complexities at this stage.

There's obvious potential to question the ostensible bio-determinism driving the threat of the Fabricants that necessitates murdering them all. Maybe that comes in a later volume, but for now, the story seems content with playing straight that No. 100 is only so effectively "tamed" by Ashibi insofar as she's interested in eventually co-opting his body. That does create an amusing way to underscore 100's overprotective "care" of the boy, especially in the first chapter before the reveal. But that's also the only trick to their relationship the writing really has so far. There's no question of how possible it would be for Fabricants to rebel against their urge to murder and assimilate people, apart from an allusion to the idea that they're all suffering from collective daddy issues. Even Ashibi getting assigned by an anti-Fabricant org to kill a "likable" Fabricant is still couched in the point that it's using those charms to kill people—and that's before that whole situation is subverted to reveal they're fighting another human/Fabricant pair in what feels like it's setting itself up to become just another Jump monster-tamer battle royale story.

100 herself should be the bankable feature of a manga like this, but she doesn't have a strong enough presence so far. She mostly gets by on her design which I can at least see some people being into. Whom amongst us wouldn't want to be accompanied by a hot, scary-strong murder marm? But her pointed place at the top of the Fabricant power levels sees her winning almost all her fights in a single stroke. Even the one where she pulls some clever moves (creating a meat zipline) comes about because of the plot constructing it around the contrivance of her not being allowed to hurt any human bystanders, and I can't imagine how often they'll go through the trouble of setting that one up. It all gets sewn together into something that's not scary, with action that isn't particularly good, and writing that sure as hell doesn't have the intellectual chops to interface with the deeper conceptual possibilities of its material.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

When I read the author's note at the start of Fabricant 100, I felt mildly hopeful. It's an important piece of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that we feel sympathy for the doctor's creation, after all, so Daisuke Enoshima's statement that he just wants to make Frankenstein's Monster happy makes sense. Then later in the book, there's a reference to a mortsafe, a cage erected over graves in the 19th century in a bid to stymie grave robbers and resurrection men, who would loot graveyards for the recently buried in order to fuel anatomy classes at medical schools. Since Fabricant 100's use of the term is for an institution that protects humans from the depredations of fabricants (Frankenstein's monsters), this again felt like an indication that Enoshima did his research.

After finishing the book, I can't deny that that's probably true. But that mild hope I felt is pretty much gone, because despite some very promising elements, Fabricant 100's first volume simply isn't very good. It uses interesting themes, particularly in the idea that the fabricants are driven by some internal guidance to become the most perfect humans ever, which means that they go around killing humans with enhanced or strong senses in order to implant them within themselves. This means that the “perfect human” isn't, by definition, human, something which eludes both the doctor who created the fabricants and the fabricants themselves. But the execution is so jumbled that any research and solid thematic work is lost.

Protagonist Ashibi Yao is working with the superstrong Fabricant 100 to get revenge on fabricants for killing his family, particularly his older sister, which makes sense. As time as gone on, he seems to see 100 as a substitute for his dead sister, and she likely sees herself the same way, although she's still willing to take him for parts when he hits eighteen. But this all gets mixed up in a variety of messy action scenes and attempts to clarify Ashibi's position, as well as the later addition of Luka and Mortsafe, whose ambitions are also confusing. It feels like Enoshima's ambition outweighed his skill, and he tried to cram too much into what might have worked better as a simpler story. The hodgepodge that we get doesn't do justice to its themes, and the art isn't strong enough to make up for it.

If you're looking for a manga reimagining of Frankenstein, I'd suggest picking up Victoria's Electric Coffin or Junji Ito's straight retelling of Shelley's book. Fabricant 100 may improve going forward, but right now it can't get out of its own way.