Warning! Spoilers ahead for Choujin X chapter 22!
Mangaka Sui Ishida is already building a more complex world in his new manga Choujin X than he ever did in his earlier Tokyo Ghoul series.
World-building was obviously never Ishida’s main focal point when telling Tokyo Ghoul‘s story. Along with the struggles of ghouls who tried to fight their urges, Ishida instead captured the hearts and interests of fans by how he portrayed the grotesque nature of his more immoral eponymous creations like the extremist Aogiri Tree group and the terrifying Ghoul Restaurant. Ishida also devoted pages to exploring the different types of the ghoul predatory organ known as the kagune, especially when ghouls became cannibalistic kakuja. Moreover, he confined his world to just 24 wards in his version of Tokyo.
In chapter 22 of his new manga Choujin X, Ishida’s narrator teases a complex history that goes back quite far, suggesting this new world will be much more expansive than Tokyo Ghoul ever was. In this instance, the narrator goes back 70 years when there was actually a whole nation of choujin, as opposed to how it is now where these superpowered beings are few in number and live in the shadows. It isn’t just the diverging states of the current and past worlds that make this Choujin X history intriguing, but the fact that the past was fraught with conflict. There was actually a great war during this time between choujin and humans as well, a description that promises a more detailed explanation in the coming chapters to complicate Ishida’s Choujin X world further. This time period is made even more mysterious through the introduction of a legendary figure known as the War Choujin Queem whose quotations shared during the chapter add to their illustriousness.
In comparison, Sui Ishida did attempt to create a sense of history when building the world of Tokyo Ghoul, but it didn’t go back that far to create the larger sense of legacy that clearly exists in Choujin X. Before Tokyo Ghoul:re, Ishida created the illusion that there was much more to the story than the current events of the manga through the stories of the legendary Commission Counter Ghoul agent known as Arima after chapter 100. Despite his young age, Arima rose through the ranks and actually succeeded in hurting the One-Eyed Owl, another legendary figure whom readers only heard about up until this point. But this larger world was actually much smaller than fans had hoped as Ken Kaneki later faces Arima himself (and loses his memory as a result) and the One-Eyed Owl turns out to actually be a character in disguise fans already knew about.
Although Tokyo Ghoul is still by far the superior series, mangaka Sui Ishida made it abundantly clear early on that he didn’t intend to build up the world of Tokyo Ghoul beyond his main cast of characters including hero Ken Kaneki. Aside from the aforementioned examples, the farthest Ishida actually went was Yoshimura’s tragic history with the mysterious organization known as V. The fact that Ishida is introducing the so-called Choujin War and the War Choujin Queem in Choujin X as early as chapter 22 creates the very exciting impression that he’s planning on building a much larger world than he ever did in Tokyo Ghoul.
