Japan is threatened by giant monsters. Usual in manga you will tell me. Just wait for the human savior but in Rooster Fighter, the messiah is all feathers and claws.
An animal against monsters
Japanese cities are attacked by gigantic monsters, the kijū. Humans seem helpless in the face of this sudden threat. However, a rooster raises his lugs to save humanity. Keiji, will he be tall when he barely reaches the height of the ankles of humans? Rooster Fighter is a crazy work published by Mangetsu who, after Ping Kong, digs the furrow of series with totally improbable pitches. However, this new series is not limited to an original idea. Writer and cartoonist Shu Sakuratani starts from this crazy idea to build a series with multiple layers of meaning.
The action is extremely successful. The reader is totally involved in the fighting. But we also laugh a lot about completely improbable situations. The rooster rushes like a cannonball to jostle the kiju. He knows how to fight but his decisive weapon is the cocori-K.-O, a cry capable of exploding the brains of monsters. If we laugh very often, the emotions are very varied. We are moved to discover Keiji's past, to understand the causes of his anger – a member of his family was by a kijû – and his hatred. Kijū are as gigantic as they are ridiculous. Shu Sakuratani admirably renders this duality by the destruction they cause and their bodies totally deformed. The reader is torn between the humor of these ridiculous monsters and the contempt for their pathetic words.
Humans or animals, which is wilder
The actions of the main character of Rooster Fighter are heroic. Keiji comes to restore justice but never stays. A migratory bird, it fulfills its mission and then goes hunting for a new kiju. The cinephile recognizes a well-known figure of westerns. Keiji is a supportive cowboy who arrives in the city to remove an injustice and then leaves. Like many anti-heroes of the 1970s, the rooster is absolutely not pleasant. From the first page, we see him copulating with a hen that he abandons just after the act. Keiji is no kinder to other birds than they appreciate. Coming to meet a sage in a zoo, he finds the young ignorant and evil. The cartoonist made the original choice to present Keiji through a vulgar anthropomorphism. Keiji is both fully an animal following his instincts and a human who thinks, speaks and above all criticizes.
He hates human society, which he finds hypocritical. Worse, he finds the children totally stupid and runs away from them. Kijū are also a caricature of Japanese society. The author takes advantage of humour to show the dreary life of salarymen, the exclusion of the marginalized and the abandonment of the elderly. Shu Sakuratani also denounces the pervasive violence in both humans and animals. It is just more hypocritical and hidden in our country. At the end of Rooster Fighter, we have the feeling that human society is even harder. It does not just attack the body but the feelings that each monster illustrates.
We may initially think that Rooster Fighter is a pure humorous delirium but the first volume of this series demonstrates the surprising depth of Shu Sakuratani's work. The reader oscillates between laughter through parody and absurd situations and tears through Keiji's committed speech and violence. Mangetsu has therefore found a nugget of which we can't wait to chronicle the sequel.
You can find other titles just as crossed out in the chronicles on Ping Kong and Clean with passion.
