Why Hunter × Hunter is Worth the Wait – This Week in Anime

senpai July 7, 2024

0 1 10 minutes read

Lucas and Steve catch up on the Hunter × Hunter manga in time for the long-awaited new chapter and gush about why, even with years between releases, Hunter × Hunter is worth it.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Hunter × Hunter and Yū Yū Hakusho are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, while Hunter × Hunter manga is available on the Shonen Jump app.

Lucas

Hi Steve! I hate to involve you in a public apology, but I just wanted to apologize to our readership for a TWIA I participated in the other week. A while back, Nick and I shared some skepticism about Shonen Jump‘s future, with some of its biggest series ending in the near future.

It turns out that column was a moot point because the sleeping giant of Shonen Jump, Hunter × Hunter is coming back! AGAIN!

Steve

That’s a crazy coincidence because I hear they also finally caught the guy who always rushes to make the first snarky comment about Yoshihiro Togashi‘s work ethic every time there’s Hunter × Hunter manga news. This is what he looks like.

Oh damn! With all these updates, the folks over at the HxH wiki are gonna be working overtime to make these edits!

In all seriousness, the manga’s impending return is great news, but I’m always full of conflicting feelings when Togashi delivers these updates, either officially or cryptically. While I’m a fairly recent Hunter × Hunter enjoyer, I’ve been aware of his ongoing health problems and hiatuses for much longer.

It’s tough because we don’t have much of a window into Togashi’s personal life and motivations. (The man JUST got on social media and did it the most dad way possible, after all.) On the one hand, I hope he isn’t continuing to work because of external pressure or because he feels like he owes something to his readers. But on the other hand, if he wants to keep releasing HxH chapters for his sense of fulfillment, power to him, and I hope he’s now doing so in a way that’s considerate of his health.

I mean, I get it. Art is clearly his passion, and HxH is indisputably his magnum opus. I can’t even begin to fathom the frustration stemming from having a body that won’t cooperate with you. Every time he gives us a glimpse into the shit he has to put up with just to draw a single panel, it’s heartbreaking. But it’s obvious that he wants to work, and he wants to do so on his terms. And we’re lucky he can still do so. Period.

Absolutely! Regardless of his motivations, I respect and appreciate Yoshihiro Togashi more than any other manga artist. I still cannot believe the sheer GALL of HxH first returning after 4+ years and Togashi not including any “the story so far” style catch-up segment. He just threw folks back into the story, which indicates that he’s making this manga as much for himself as he is for the readers.

It’s true! I finished up the 2011 anime about two years ago, but I just started reading past the election arc to prepare for this column. I’m all caught up now, and if I didn’t already know about the hiatuses, then I doubt I would have picked up on them from the manga alone. It’s all pretty seamless, and by that, I mean dense, abstruse, uncompromising, ambitious, labyrinthine, and utterly compelling.

Oh my god!, YES! My gesture towards the wiki earlier wasn’t just me trying to sneak a fun reference into this chat; having the HxH wiki open in another tab is almost required to keep up with all these characters, their motivations, and their ever-changing relationships. It’s dense to the point of near impenetrability to newcomers.

…that being said, I don’t know if there’s any manga out there with better character writing than Hunter × Hunter, and, without fail, it’s the best series in Shonen Jump by a mile when a new chapter does appear in the magazine.

Many shonen manga, especially the stuff featured in Jump, tend to invite all kinds of unwarranted hyperbole from their fans. But Hunter × Hunter is an exception where I think the endless adulations are deserved. Togashi essentially reinvents the manga with each new arc, and each time he pushes past his prior limits, he seeks ever-higher peaks of narrative and character complexity. It’s like the manga is a shonen protagonist that keeps getting bigger and more powerful.

It’s also shocking how he keeps ahead of the curve on social issues and discourse. Through Killua and Alluka in the 13th Hunter Chairman Election arc, Togashi examined the strained family dynamics that can emerge when a relative comes out as trans. Furthermore, the ongoing Succession Contest arc seems to be about how, as a rule, nepo babies suck…and this arc started before that term even existed!

It helps that Togashi casts a wide net when dredging up his influences, so whether it’s his intention or not, he inevitably ends up putting together potent combinations. The Succession Contest, in particular, seems like his most ambitious synthesis of what inspired him to write previous arcs. You’ve got the mafia mind games of Yorknew, the political intrigue of the Chimera Ant debacle, the corrosive familial power plays of the Zoldycks, and so on. It rules.

I also love his commitment to more and more galaxy brain-nen powers. The dude is out here laying the groundwork for confrontations that’ll need PowerPoint presentations to understand.

I know people like to ascribe the title of “Most Convoluted Fights” to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but nine times out of 10 HxH has that series beat!

Hunter × Hunter is also a fantastic argument for why manga should draw inspiration from sources beyond other manga. Togashi’s affinity for sliding his flights of fancy into the story, both big and small, never fails to entertain.

His decision to compare a human head to a bowling ball solely because the sport became his special interest for a while is incredibly endearing and human. And that humanity shines through in the rest of his writing, too! Knuckle deciding he had to land a clean hit on Youpi because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t, Kurapika committing to his (totally justified) revenge quest, and Leorio sucking in the way that all guys in their 20s suck for a while; all feel like authentic decisions that map onto people I know in real life.

Humanizing touches like that help ground the material even as its aims grow ever loftier. They’re also, arguably, the beating heart of the series. Like, probably the neatest/cruelest trick HxH pulls is our dawning realization that Killua is normal and Gon is the scary one—a realization that comes to an explosive head in the Chimera Ant arc. When we first meet the two kids, they’re wholly archetypical, but throughout the story, Togashi gives them enough definition and distinction to pull this off.

Aw, Anime’s Best Boi is a little sociopath. Who could’ve seen it coming???

Maybe it’s a bit trite to call it a subversion of shonen protagonism, but I think it’s neat that Togashi looked at the Goku archetype and decided to mold it into something even more adorable and more alien.

And he’s done that with SO MANY of the characters in HxH on top of Gon! Finally, getting the origins of the Phantom Troupe in the last batch of chapters elevated them from great villains to some of the best, most justified villains in the medium.

And then there’s Hisoka! Oh, Hisoka…

By all accounts, I should hate this guy more than any other character in the series, but I truly cannot wait to see how this sexy, problematic clown man murders every member of the Phantom Troupe and, probably, sinks the boat they’re all on in the process.

He is genuinely one of the best freaks ever put on paper. He forces every other character (and the audience) to groan at his shit and gets away with it every time. To add insult to injury, his fight with Chrollo is probably the most incomprehensible thing in the entire series so far, and he dares to lose, die, and come back to life to troll the Phantom Troupe all over again. He’s insufferable. I hope he never leaves.

On another note, of all of Togashi’s dalliances with style and genre, I think I like it the most when he dips into horror because he’s just so damn good at it. I literally recoiled away from my tablet when I swiped over to this page.

Hisoka: Is killed by the power of friendship

Hisoka: Revives himself “Damn…I can’t believe I was killed by the power of friendship.”
Hisoka: “…ah well, guess I gotta kill all his friends!”

Man, I wish I had more of an art background so that I could better describe Togashi’s artistic style because it is incredibly affecting. He is also great at drawing monsters and all kinds of weird creatures. I think a big part of what makes his artwork stand out is the juxtaposition between his usually minimalist character designs and how he’ll bust out INCREDIBLE amounts of detail for a single page or panel to drive the emotionality of the scene home.

The man is an uncontested polymath when it comes to art and design. If we were to focus on Tserriednich’s spirit beast alone, we see an instantly evocative creature design, a ton of great panel compositions, and a uniquely bone-chilling transformation. I’m sure there are dedicated horror mangaka out there who would kill to have come up with something this uncanny.

You can tell that Togashi has had a lot of fun coming up with these nen spirit beast designs. His limiters are off.

Wow, backtracking in this convo a bit, but you reminded me that the nen spirit beasts are more or less Togashi’s take on Stands from JJBA. He’s made them so distinct in their own right that I completely forgot the fairly direct connection!

I had the same thought this weekend! And I like the added stipulations that the successors can’t directly control their beasts, and (if I’m remembering correctly) they can’t harm each other with them either. In addition to distinguishing them from Stands, those restrictions breed the kind of creativity HxH‘s confrontations are famous for. And it’s also worth mentioning that Togashi toyed with spirit beasts in Yū Yū Hakusho. I guess he really likes the idea of having weird-looking, ethereal critters hanging around his characters.

Agreed. After all, what could possibly be a weirder critter than…a door!?

But his stellar creature designs are a further testament to his strength as a character designer. The only mangaka I think tops Togashi in this regard is Akira Toriyama, and that’s only because there are a bunch of great little dudes in Dragon Quest.

Toriyama was simply the GOAT. I can’t imagine Togashi didn’t look up to him as a peer and a paragon. It still doesn’t feel real that we lost him earlier this year, although that’s one more reason I’m glad we still have Togashi around. If you ask me, the man has earned his laurels several times over, and every new page he gives us is a precious gift. And yes, that includes the ones that are 90% internal monologue because that shit owns.

I remember the Chimera Ant arc anime adaptation having some episodes where 20 minutes were spent covering and dissecting a single 20-second conversation, and I loved it each time. When the writing is that good, you want to savor it.

How have people made it this far into Hunter × Hunter without realizing that the (seemingly) random tangents and surprise deep dives are a massive part of what makes this series work so well as a whole? Also…come on, gang. You can get plenty out of HxH while skimming the walls of text. Character motivations and their relationships are made pretty clear pretty often. You can go along for the ride on this series without devolving into a hater!

I think it’s reasonable to be confused and/or frustrated by the density of balls Togashi has juggling in the air, but I have no sympathy for people who think Togashi is lazy or phoning it in. Yes, his health issues have slowed the chapters to a drip feed, but they are still packed with great art, thoughtful compositions, and layered writing. Plus, for every page suffused with exposition, you get a sublime page like pigeon handcuffs here. Hunter × Hunter contains multitudes.

“Does your ability even have a point?” A bold question from a man whose power is turning objects into animals!

Panels like these remind me of the sheer creativity bleeding through every layer of HxH. There are so many novel examinations of people and powers. One of my favorite factions is the soldiers who do not care about their country or king AT ALL and are only united in their shared propensity for slacking and trying to survive their (likely mandatory) service.

Quiet quitting. You love to see it.

On the other hand, Togashi really seems like he would rather die than quit. I hope it doesn’t come to that point any time soon but given the epic scope of Hunter × Hunter, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect he’ll finish it in his lifetime. But I also don’t think it’s reasonable to expect manga creators to pump out a new chapter week after week. With a timeline like that, it’s no wonder so many creators burn out or obliterate their health. So, I’m glad Togashi seems to have found an arrangement that works for him. If it minimizes his suffering while letting him do what he loves, then I don’t mind waiting as long as it takes for him to tell this story in the way he wants to. That’s all I want out of any artist.

And if Hunter × Hunter has made one thing clear over the course of its already impressive run, the journey is so much more important than the destination. Gon found his dad more than a decade ago now in real-world time. The series could have ended right there, but it’s marched forward and only gotten better now that it doesn’t have to hold to its original conceit.

The entirety of the unadopted stretch of the manga feels like icing on top of the HxH cake. It doesn’t matter if it gets a proper ending or comes out with any consistency; every new chapter feels like a treat and is a small blessing that should be celebrated.

There’s too much else to be said about Hunter × Hunter, where it’s been, and where it might be going. But suffice it to say, I’m with Togashi until the end.