The mouth is one of the most important parts of the body. I should know: my mom used to work in a dentist, so growing up we never had any candy or soda in the house. If I ever wanted a snack, the answer was always “There’s fruit in the bowl” or “Have a piece of toast,” not “Here’s a bowl of Reese’s Pieces.” Looking back now as an adult, that’s some excellent parenting, but it was the source of constant friction back in the day. 

Such an upbringing made diving into Cells at Work! Dental an interesting experience. As the latest in a long line of spinoffs from Akane Shimizu’s original 2015 manga, it moves the focus away from the whole body and specifically towards the mouth, focusing on various aspects of dental health. Kaede Sasaki is the artist, while Koma Warita is pulling double duty after penning another spinoff in 2023 that focused on how medicine works in the body.

Perhaps by design, there are a lot of familiar concepts here. Just like the original series, the main character is an absent-minded Red Blood Cell who forms an unlikely friendship with a serious and somewhat aloof White Blood Cell. One of the only differences here is that other cells actively avoid the White Blood Cell because of his combat capabilities, forming a complex that is addressed throughout the opening chapter in various ways.

Anyone who has had any experience with any versions of the series will also understand intuitively the way that the story uses metaphor and heightened imagery to explain real life biological processes. For the mouth, bacteria are represented as an army of sci-fi demons who attack a wall of teeth that enclose an idyllic town inside the mouth. The resulting visual parallels to Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan are likely not an accident, especially when ice cream and even dentistry tools take on the air of a giant kaiju.

Even though the original version of the series did not give much attention to the human side of the story, subsequent spinoffs have placed more and more emphasis on the hosts of the cells who work within. In this sense, Cells at Work! Dental is no exception: not only is the human body named as Akari, the chaotic strife that occurs between the cells and army of bacteria is shown as a direct consequence of her poor dental hygiene. You gotta brush for two minutes at least twice a day, kids.

Speaking of other spinoffs, they ultimately create an unfortunate comparison that Kaede Sasaki and Koma Warita cannot hope to win. If this was the first iteration on Shimizu’s initial concept, Cells at Work! Dental probably would’ve been completely passable, but there are currently no less than sixteen different subseries by my count. Would it be a controversial statement to say that Cells at Work! Black is the best one, too?

For those of us who haven’t enough Cells at Work!, here’s another serving that definitely scratches that itch. In much the same way that an ice cream a day can quickly pile up and lead to cavities, just make sure you’re watching your intake.

Chapter One Club is a weekly column that aims to spotlight the latest in new series and one-shots from across a wide variety of different demographics and publications.