Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo Review

Akutami wrote the premise and handed the pages to Yuji Iwasaki, and the premise is the good part. Sixty-eight years after the Culling Game, cursed energy has been industrialised: sorcery runs through hardware, the jujutsu world has a bureaucracy and a consumer market, and the threat is no longer a cursed spirit but the Simurians, an alien species that turns up already fluent in the thing humanity spent a century learning to survive. Yuka and Tsurugi Okkotsu work alongside a Simurian diplomat, and for a few chapters the book is about negotiation rather than about who wins a fight.

It never gets to finish that thought. Akutami said in advance that the run would be six months and three volumes, and the schedule shows in every arc: characters arrive and are resolved within a chapter or two, the Simurian politics stay a sketch, and the final chapter closes on a cliffhanger the volumes do not answer.

Iwasaki draws cleanly, with better spatial sense than the parent series and less of its scratchy nervous energy, though the fights are competent rather than memorable. What is left is a pitch document with good art on it. Three volumes are an easy afternoon, and a poor answer to the series it continues.