Now that Far Cry 5 is out, I’ve been looking up cutscenes of the hot-bod priest sama and his demented congregation. There is considerable visual tension between the pastorly calm of his spectacles and his Russian-mobster chest, enough to play with ideas of that old stereotype about grannies saying he was “too genteel to do this or that shit” – the unnervingly calm villain – even when he is raving about some Book of Revelations type spiel. I like it. Very cool, and (more importantly) marketably cool. Menacing enough of a charismatic villain for people who do not know how villainy or charisma manifests itself in the real world – and he has enough poses for action figures.

The protagonist of Fire Punch starts out as an incest-mongering siscon wrapped in the flames of God’s eternal curse, and the suffering of the world. I think he’d make a good action figure, but no marketing team will ever take him into consideration because they do not want sister-fuckers on the shelves. Backstory aside, he has a kinda bland personality. Then, he is joined by your lovable meta-commentative immortal psychopath – a wannabe film director and film buff who wants to make the best B-movie revenge plot out of siscon Human Torch, and maims and destroys as many tropes as bad guys. The world around them is sketched in loving detail by mangaka Fujimoto Tatsuki. This is his personal vision and he gives no fucks about linearity, but rather intends to throw in as many subversions, dour social commentary, and cool action scenes as possible in the span of 80 chapters. Fire Punch is – as a result – what I would label ‘unmarketably cool’. While Far Cry 5 idealizes a real world premise to turn it comic-book – Fire Punch starts from the perspective of comic book, and then slowly inserts humanity in, until you realize that mankind is violent slapstick and nobody is laughing in the end. The latter approach, I feel, has more balls because it shows all the cards, the artifice, and then fucks you later with the shiv hidden under the table. Of course, the result is you have most readers crying about the ‘train-wreck’ that the manga is in the forums. Once again, proof that no action-figures will be made of siscon Human Torch.

Although, ultimately, Fire Punch edgecore maximus that pales in comparison to a lot of other stuff (wait for Dan Schneider’s corpus for how to do truly mature edge and grit) – I do enjoy it because it has the special kind of edge that feels earnest, and when it goes all the way, it goes all the way. No half-measures here. None of the silly pretense. Crazy entertainment might as well be this crazy.