The New Manga By The Author Of One Punch Man Takes Life Hacks to A New Level

ONE is one of the most prolific writers the anime and manga world has ever seen. As the mind that gave us One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100, two vastly different explorations of the overpowered protagonist trope that are both highly regarded by fans of either medium. With Mob Psycho 100 long finished, ONE has finally gotten another Shueisha-published serialization underway together with illustrator and mangaka Kiyoto Shitara, and it is very different from the work that gained him critical acclaim.

Bug Ego follows two high school boys as they learn about and exploit “glitches” that occur in real life. Beyond the fact that it is written by ONE, what makes Bug Ego a manga to look out for over the coming years?

Background and Plot

Talk About “Life Hacks”

Bug Ego follows a high school student named Mikoto Hitsujiya, who transfers to a new school and meets the class weirdo, a boy named Takehiro Kokudo, who introduces him to the concept of “bugs”, which, in programming, refer to unintended outcomes or errors that can occur in a program’s code. The only difference here is that Kokudo introduces Hitsujiya to bugs that occur in reality and not in cyberspace or on a computer. Kokudo teaches Hitsujiya how to exploit various kinds of inexplicable phenomena, which become accessible if one performs the requisite actions in the right way, like cheat codes in video games. Over time, the two grow closer as they test and discover the wildly ridiculous yet sometimes oddly helpful glitches that exist, and Hitsujiya comes to develop an addiction to testing out new hacks. However, when a certain hack is said to have the ability to profoundly change the future, Hitsujiya realizes that messing around with the mysterious phenomena may have extremely dire consequences.

Bug Ego is a story penned by ONE, with art by Kiyoto Shitara, the creator of the 2022 supernatural yakuza action manga, Katagimodoshi. The series is published in Shueisha’s Young Jump Dai Ichiwa (“Young Jump Chapter One”) magazine, a publication where manga artists can submit the initial chapter of a new story, and readers vote on which new stories should be allowed to continue with a serialization within Shueisha’s Weekly Young Jump seinen magazine. While it is published in the irregularly released Dai Ichiwa magazine, Bug Ego was not being tested as a concept when the first chapter was released in April 2023. There are currently only four chapters of the manga available to read, with VIZ Media publishing the manga in English on their website. Bug Ego is also available on Shueisha’s Manga Plus platform. With the way that the manga explores the hack concept and how that devolves very rapidly, Bug Ego is described by those familiar with it as a comedy-horror, with some truly terrifying elements being backed up by ONE’s well-established talent for humour.

The Art of Rapid Escalation

Bug Ego’s Core Concept Very Quickly Becomes Scary

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Early in the first chapter, we are introduced to the main characters and learn a bit more about them. Hitsujiya is a transfer student who, when told that violent senior students frequent the bathrooms, tries to reassure the nerdy-looking Kokudo that he was once a target for bullies and managed to find a “life hack” to self-improvement. Prompted by the idea Hitsujiya presented about the possibility of making things easier for oneself in various ways through “hacks”, Kokudo takes him to a strange vending machine to show him a few hacks of his own, like how putting in a coin and pressing the buttons in a specific drink order makes bird poop appear at a streetlight nearby. Realizing that hacks might be real, Hitsujiya lets Kokudo tell him about all kinds of hacks, and they experiment with most of them, until Kokudo tells him about the hack to get a perfect score in every test.

Kokudo tells Hitsujiya of a very embarrassing ritual that enables one to go back in time, but it involves streaking in front of the whole school. When Hitsujiya does so, he makes a mistake in the ritual and becomes a social pariah, and to make things worse, his only friend pretended not to know what he was talking about in an attempt to avoid leaking the hacks to the public. The series skips ahead several decades to the point where the two are old men, with Hitsujiya homeless and rummaging through trash still utterly enamoured by the concept of hacks. Rokudo soon locates him and after bearing the brunt of Hitsujiya’s anger, he explains that the reason for his betrayal was because hacks are not meant to be shared, so he had to dispose of the evidence. However, if Hitsujiya could attempt the embarrassing ritual at the school once more, he could get it right and return to a much earlier point.

So Why Read Bug Ego?

The Sincere, the Surreal and the Downright Banal All in One

All of this is just the first chapter, which combines an interesting core concept with a level of banal hilarity that we’ve seen in ONE’s works time and time again, but this time, it is the art by Shitara that enhances the surreal feeling Bug Ego gives its reader, with several hilarious panels being rendered to the point of hyperrealism to create a meme-like effect. How Bug Ego straddles comedy, absurdity and explores the various kinds of hacks makes a compelling, albeit insane manga that is still, oddly enough, rather sincere in its approach to depicting the central friendship. Hopefully, we’ll get more chapters of this unique series in the future, but for now, there are only four chapters available. If you like ONE’s work, and are interested in strange supernatural developments and absurdism underlined by a great friendship between the core characters (we’re looking at you, DANDADAN fans), then Bug Ego is definitely for you.

Bug Ego is available on VIZ Media’s online platform and app.

More reading: Crunchyroll