Battle Manga and the Physical Body

The origins of story-based manga:
Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois [The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck]

　Rodolphe Töpffer—considered the pioneer of modern story-based manga—drew duel scenes in one of his earliest works, Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois.

The protagonist of the work repeatedly demonstrates his immortality, refusing to die even when, for example, he is hung, a predicament he escapes by running away and taking the beam to which the rope is tied with him. However, it is quite interesting that scenes of sword-inflicted stab wounds and bleeding are avoided. (Even when the character attempts to commit suicide by using a sword, he accidentally runs the sword into his armpit and faints.)

Suihō Tagawa’s slapstick comedy:
Shinshū Sakuranosuke

Bleeding is not drawn in this work either. The supernatural immortality of the manga characters transforms excessive violence into something funny—as is seen in many cartoon movies and slapstick gags, and further accelerates such violence.

Osamu Tezuka’s destruction that implies death:
Astro Boy

　In terms of modern manga, Osamu Tezuka’s depictions of wounds (that imply death and are apparently fatal) are often reflected on as a major turning point.

In contrast, the second frame shows that Buggy—the chop-chop man—can be injured by blows but not by blades (which cannot make him bleed). These abilities are polar opposites, but both of them essentially restore the traditional manga physical-body image.
In addition, most of One Piece’s characters are practically invulnerable—similarly to Töpffer’s works—and the work makes full use of various developments as its characters come back from wounds that imply death.

The ultimate in destruction of the human body:
Apocalypse Zero

The full extent of expression in battle manga can be seen when destruction is depicted at its most extreme. In Takayuki Yamaguchi’s Apocalypse Zero (Akita Shoten, 1994), even when the protagonist cannot so much as make a fist and his entire body is completely destroyed, he finds ways to continue fighting (the first image),

and the author fully utilizes every aspect of the setting to make the idea of coming back from fatal wounds seem persuasive (the second image).
　As is implied by the existence of the phrase card game battle, the theme of battle is similar to games, sports, combat sports, and other competitions, and the relationship between the destruction of foes on the one hand and destruction at the hands of foes on the other is arguably a symbol of battle manga.

An extremely tough and durable physical body:
Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME!

BLAME! (Kodansha, 1997) includes a scene in which the protagonist loses around 40% of his body mass and spends a period of over 127,460 hours (around 14 and a half years) restoring himself.

Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME! is a science fiction story with a spatial scale comparable to the Solar System and a temporal scale extending over centuries and millennia, and its battles are enormous in scale as well. The story makes readers marvel not so much at how hard characters are to kill but rather at the level of durability that enables characters to go in living for such incredible spans of time, always preserving themselves and never faltering.
Ultimate science fiction battles at the scale of the universe can perhaps also be seen in Ken Ishikawa’s Getter Robo series and Kyomu Senki [Records of Nothingness] (Futabasha, 1999).

Development in shōjo (girls’) manga:
Sukeban Deka [Delinquent Girl Detective]

　Among shōjo manga, the works of male writers—including Osamu Tezuka’s Ribon no Kishi [Princess Knight] (Kodansha, 1953) and Shinji Wada’s Sukeban Deka [Delinquent Girl Detective] (Hakusensha, 1975)—as well as war stories such as Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (SHUEISHA Inc., 1972) showed signs of battle manga.
The 1980s and 1990s marked the start of the rise of female shōnen (boys’) manga writers who grew up on anime and games, and one crucial turning point for manga featuring fighting girls was Sailor Moon (Kodansha, 1992), which shows the effects of Toei’s special effects (and arguably the far-reaching effects of Shōtarō Ishinomori as well).
However, such works did not end up becoming mainstream shōjo manga, and the barriers between works for boys and girls were instead demolished as female writers expanded into boys’ magazines and the number of manga magazines targeting a gender-neutral readership increased.

Fighting with immortals:
Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (SHUEISHA Inc., 2016) depicts battles between immortal demons and mortal humans. This work’s setting is therefore ambitious compared to other shōnen manga battles, which generally include regeneration methods. However, the shackles represented by the humans’ inability to regenerate actually accelerate the “godlike/demonlike” fighting ability of the humans as well as the immortality of their inherited traditions as opposed to their individual immortality.
One might say that demons that do not die are manga while people who die are humans, which could also perhaps be interpreted as a battle between characters who cannot be hurt on the one hand and the significance of the manga inherited as a tradition by manga artists—a reprinted form of art read by successive generations of readers—on the other.