“Victory and Defeat”
Creative Staff
Story: Kenji Ichima
Art: Tsunehiro Date
Translation: Stephen Paul
Lettering: Snir Aharon
What They Say:
On a cold and stormy night, I decided to give up on my dream. But lightning strikes! And now I have an issue of Shonen Jump from the future! Teppei Sasaki is a passionate rookie manga artist who dreams of getting a series in Weekly Shonen Jump. One day, he gets a copy of Jump from ten years in the future. Is it all a coincidence, or is it fate? Whatever the case, destiny is about to change…. Time Warps! Destinies intersected! For a tomorrow that was never meant to be.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
This chapter covers the same period from chapter 10 but from Teppei’s point of view. White Knight has dropped in the rankings to number 2 slot and Itsuki’s Anima has become number one. Teppei discusses what he can do with his manga with his editor, Muneoka. It’s weird seeing Muneoka actually be an editor and give Teppei valuable advice. Then Itsuki moves the topic to Itsuki. Muneoka reveals how Itsuki has taken on the weight of creating a manga on her shoulders. He tried to help her but she asked for a change of editor and he was removed from his duties. Teppei calls Itsuki to check up on her. She brushes him off and says she is doing well.
Then the story reaches the prophesied time. Itsuki has died of exhaustion. Teppei is breaking down and yelling at the time-traveling robot for his failures. The robot opens up a gate to an unknown point of time. Teppei needing to fail to set up this situation is done well. It can motivate him even further having to experience someone’s death. Weirdly, there are various situations for how time travel works in this series. Messages can be sent and people can seemingly move around. That is why I wanted to have the rules of time travel established before this happened.
The art continues to be the selling point for this series. Tsunehiro can bring out the intensity of each character’s raw emotions to new heights. Page 6 has a fierce depiction of Teppei after he discovers that he has gone down in the rankings. There are other examples of this throughout the chapter. Tsunehiro can draw so much emotion by how they depict people’s faces.
In Summary:
This manga is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It had so much potential but it’s slowly losing that potential. It sped up so much that it feels there were many contexts lost. This manga still wants to retain some of its original themes but it’s too much. It wanted to deal with how manga is created but that has gone out the window bits by bits. This chapter is going full sci-fi as Teppei travels through time to save Itsuki. It seems a bit too sudden to be time traveling. I am intrigued by time travel and I hope it’s done right in this series.
Content Grade: C
Art Grade: A
Age Rating: Teen
Released By: Shonen Jump
Release Date: August 2, 2020
