Public Safety Arc

Denji becomes the Chainsaw Man and joins Public Safety, battling devils while navigating complex relationships with Makima, Power, and Aki.

The Public Safety arc constitutes the entire first part of Chainsaw Man, spanning the manga's initial serialization run from 2018 to 2020, and represents one of the most thematically radical and structurally unpredictable works in Weekly Shonen Jump history. Denji, a teenager who has merged with his devil dog Pochita to become the Chainsaw Man — a hybrid human-devil who transforms via the pull-cords embedded in his chest — is recruited into Public Safety Division 4 under the devil hunter Makima after his elimination of the Zombie Devil. What follows is an increasingly unhinged exploration of trauma, desire, institutional power, and the weaponization of human emotional vulnerability. The arc introduces an ensemble of devil hunters — Aki Hayakawa, Power the Blood Fiend, Himeno, Kobeni, and others — whose relationships with each other and with the supernatural threats they face are developed with more psychological complexity than the series' grotesque surface suggests. The Gun Devil — a catastrophic entity responsible for a single event that killed over a million people worldwide in thirty-seven seconds — serves as the arc's overarching threat, with the recovery of Gun Devil flesh fragments driving the plot forward through escalating missions. Makima's true nature and agenda gradually reveal themselves through a series of shocks and reversals, each of which strips away something Denji has come to care about. The Darkness Devil's appearance during the International Assassins arc — a sequence set in a hellspace outside normal causality — represents the manga's most nightmarish visual achievement. The arc's conclusion reframes every relationship and alliance the series has established through a revelation that is simultaneously shocking and, in retrospect, meticulously foreshadowed.