Shonen Jump launches The Hunters Guild: Red Hood, Yuki Kawaguchi’s debut manga. The author was Kouhei Horikoshi’s assistant for My Hero Academia, and now offers a unique and grim version of classic Western fairy tales
Last week, the new manga of Ryuhei Tamura, Hard-Boiled cop and Dolphin, has reached its conclusion after about forty chapters. After Beelzebub, the author struggles to find a new dimension for his work, producing works whose serialization ends up being short.
In its place, Shueisha this week publishes the winning manga of the fourteenth Gold Future Cup rookie manga competition, The Hunters Guild: Red Hood, of Yuki Kawaguchi. The author is a new name, but something immediately stands out in his work: he in fact worked together with the sensei Kouhei Horikoshi in My Hero Academia. The unique style that Horikoshi has given to his best seller has been excellently collected by Kawaguchi, who has managed to make it his own. As pointed out by the publisher, it is now even more unique and particular.
As always, the first chapter can be viewed for free on MangaPlus.
The Hunters Guild: Red Hood, una favola per adulti
To tell the truth, the premises of the work are among the most classic: the small village of the young man Velou he is scourged by a ferocious one werewolf, which is devouring its inhabitants one after the other. The kid wishes he could fight back, but the mayor paid a large sum to hire a hunter from the Guild.
A huntress with the appearance of a little girl shows up, named Grimm and dressed in a red hooded dress. It turns out that she is actually an experienced adult, and Velou will be crudely introduced to the reality of the monster world she lives in.
The citations to the European fairy tales of the Middle Ages are innumerable, and simple to identify. It must be said that there is not so much originality in terms of content, being the “modernization” of fairy tales a very popular trend in the last decades, and already widely abused by Hollywood. The typically shonen narrative structure of the work is itself well anchored in the clichés we are used to. Of course, this is not necessarily bad.
To push the manga is the captivating style of Kawaguchi, who draws a werewolf with features reminiscent of occult horrors, or the demogorgon of Stranger Things. Combined with a good dose of action, Red Hood starts well, and has great growth potential.