Helen Chazan | May 20, 2025
In The Comics Journal #311's new Manga Lending Library column, Helen Chazan examines the links between classic and contemporary manga. Chazan paired Shotaro Ishinomori's Kamen Rider with Hunter × Hunter. Excerpt below.
All images from Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter × Hunter, various translators. Above: From Vol. 3Hunter × Hunter is the manga Togashi wanted to make for himself [...] At a distance, it may not seem like that particularly personal creative accomplishment which he had promised — it’s a manga built around Shōnen Jump’s trademark mantra “Friendship, Effort, Victory” — with an upbeat boy protagonist of the same mold from which every lasting Shōnen Jump franchise has been cast, complete with a trademark fictional profession, martial arts competitions and magic systems. The series has been running for over 25 years, boasting multiple anime adaptations and a worldwide fanbase of all ages. But Togashi has kept to his word, creating Hunter × Hunter on his own terms with a smaller studio and frequent hiatuses (compare One Piece’s 100+ volumes since 1997 to Hunter × Hunter’s 37 since 1998) for his health and, one suspects, to nurture his creativity and evade the fatigue which once tarnished his craft. The most recent hiatus has lasted a full year, and Togashi recently revealed a possible ending to the series “in case he passes away before formally finishing the manga.” This is an artist who has learned to demand the treatment he deserves, with the reputation earned to get it. (One suspects his relationship with and later marriage to Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi may have given him some leverage, but I’m writing a manga column, not a celebrity gossip column.) Hunter x Hunter is the shōnen manga of a free man, every page crackling with hard-earned creative agency. The generic springboard of the Shōnen Jump manga premise is an opening for Togashi to draw whatever he pleases, in any style, setting or tone he wishes to explore.
Gon is a young boy — full of the optimism and curiosity that makes a Shōnen Jump hero — on a journey in search of his father. Gon’s father is a Hunter, a sort of self-employed secret agent and adventurer, a martial artist with a passport to the world of whatever journey they choose. To find his father, first, Gon has to become a Hunter himself and pass a death-defying series of challenges in competition with hundreds of other hopefuls. Gon succeeds in this great first step, passing the exam, within the first couple volumes. An accomplishment, to be sure, and yet it barely registers as an event. But he picks up some friends among his fellow Hunters-in-training: the androgynous Kurapika, an orphan at the hands of the mysterious Phantom Troupe seeking the Hunter license as a step toward avenging their family; Leorio, an avaricious student of medicine motivated by the lucrative nature of the hunting profession; and Killua, a chipper young boy with a mean streak, hoping to strike out on his own and abandon his assassin parents’ bloody family business. From these friendships, Gon’s journey — and Hunter × Hunter’s focus — expands and digresses, the journeys of his companions folded into his still long and winding path.
A Hunter × Hunter storyline is a tower-like structure, a linear race to or from the top over advancing levels of trials in order to achieve a personal victory or rescue a distressed captive. It’s an adventure comic built like an obstacle course. However, the path Gon and his friends travel swerves and digresses by their own humanity — new friendships formed, personal vendettas inflamed, curiosities piqued. Whether a literal tournament or an antiques auction, there’s a clear entry, exit and goal to every adventure, but also a sense that every new place is an open environment full of other people who might be pursuing their own very different ends, background sights to chance upon that reveal vital new wonders. There’s a roaming freedom and clarity to Hunter × Hunter that its contemporaries strive for but don’t quite achieve, where every setting, every event, every stake is diagrammatically clear yet can invert and disintegrate at a moment’s notice in response to a character’s motives, their drive, their emotional inner world. The goal isn’t how the story will end but where it begins.
Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball is a bit like this. Son Goku tosses aside the consequence of the world — not only exploding crises with his uncountable strength but his fondness for people and his simple love of fighting. Gon, likewise, is a classically plucky shōnen hero driven by friendship and curiosity. But his simple enthusiasm is grounded in a casual, intuitive empathy — not one for dramatic declarations of loyalty. Gon finds friends wherever he goes and follows his companions through their struggles because it’s what makes sense to him. Gon’s interiority becomes something of a mystery, even morally ambiguous. In Volume 10, a character muses about him: “There was just … pure curiosity! If something impresses him, he’s open to it whether it’s good or bad. In other words … he’s walking a fine line.”
From Vol. 11Likewise, Togashi’s art walks a fine line of pure curiosity, his pages full of idiosyncratic, dense and joyful cartooning marked with frequent stylistic digressions and experiments while remaining wholly coherent as a piece. There’s a wonderful clarity of space in Hunter × Hunter and, even on pages where backgrounds melt away into blankness, the blocking of character’s movements reflect each distinctive settings’ contours. Togashi makes every place and every character in his story distinctive, eschewing a unified “look” for the comic and rendering each figure and place in a distinct aesthetic and personality. Tetsuo Hara-esque brutes rub shoulders with bright-eyed Akira Toriyama brats, hyperreal seinen mobsters and wistful shōjo manga royalty, all with their own wardrobes. Some of it is visual storytelling. How a person presents themselves clues readers in to their personality, and some of it is Togashi’s own playful zest for cartooning, unwilling to settle down into one way of drawing. In comparison, Eiichiro Oda’s ultra-popular shōnen franchise One Piece receives praise for its distinctive art style. But the inimitable cartooning of Eiichiro Oda and his studio is a particular format nonetheless — one way to draw eyes, one way to draw ships, one way to draw pretty girls and so on. (Although others drawing manga that look like One Piece generally fail to capture Oda’s lightning in a bottle.)
And when Togashi rushes the art? Somehow, it’s even better. By Volume 6, Togashi sheepishly admits to falling behind several deadlines, and pages reflect this — background details left as freehand sketches and Togashi’s figures scratched into place with a coarse and unfinished line. Yet this wavering looseness ends up an exhilarating advancement of Togashi’s cartooning, the tournament duel that takes up the back half of the volume distilled down to raw movements and dynamic, expressive staging. There’s something almost Alex Toth-like in how Togashi cuts corners for this action set piece (or perhaps, for the anime fans reading, Kaneda school) — every detail drawn in matters, every gesture moves. More than dynamic minimalism, Togashi imbues his compositions with animated life. Few shōnen manga feel so distinctly spun from their artist’s hand.
From Vol. 7Hunter × Hunter is that rare thing readers of shōnen manga, or any popular comics, really, are looking for: creative comics-making with a clear sense of personality embedded in a commercial idiom. The art is distinctive, the stories are adventurous and everything can change by the artist’s whim. It’s so made by someone, overwhelmingly. In what used to be called mainstream American comics but might better be called superhero comics after the 1960s, works like these have tended to be marginal or sporadic, even when highly visible — a Sal Buscema Spider-Man here, a Dark Knight Strikes Again there. But Hunter × Hunter is a sustained artistic digression, an adventure that has continued for longer than some of its readers have been alive. Manga like these may not need a critical gaze to champion its greatness: Hunter × Hunter still demands critical appreciation, because what is so good about it runs counter to many of the assembly-line expectations that still rule comics industry all the world over. Hunter × Hunter has an overwhelming appeal for many readers: readers who have found and returned to the series without a weekly feed of hype and cliffhangers stringing them along. The appeal is in the manga itself, made by Yoshihiro Togashi for himself: a heartfelt reflection of his craft and imagination.
English (US) · 