No.123322
akebi stealer
No.124093
Oh shit, I forgot about the horror reviews. Someone told me he'd be checking out God's Left Hand, but that'll take'm some time so meanwhile moving on to the next author: Nakayama Masaaki.
What really sets this guy apart is his usage of warped bodies, contorted, warped, deformed, where limbs and facial features get stretched and curved. You have misshapen mouths with irregular teeth, wrecked noses, eyes jutting out and displaced, bloated corpses, and others that look like a photoshopped Kuon. Some ugly as sin, others a bit goofy. These are predominantly ghosts and as it happens a lot of them only the MC can see, they're prowling around often either aimlessly or stalking someone here and there so you gotta ignore them lest something bad happens, as usual. Arguably he abuses this aspect, in that a great deal of his horror comes from the monsters just being there and behaving identically to each other.
Seeds of Anxiety (everyday little horrors)
It's strange. You know all that stuff about focusing on the joy of the moment, of the taste of a snack, the feel of the breeze, or the view of the sunset? It's like that, but the opposite. People are walking around, doing normal things most of the time, and suddenly something macabre happens, mainly what was described above. These things are often rather silly ("he's just standing there menacingly"), but afterwards it sorta becomes... comedic? Very random, very short, like the two pages when it tells you to look out for a spooky sign on the road, someone refusing to go to the bathroom becuse the door is looking at him funny, or a spirit killing someone with one touch out in the middle of the street and flying away, in the span of four pages. Consider also this classic: https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1467/52/1467528523728.jpg
It's shocking given the glowing reviews I saw, although I understand recommending this as a niche thing, a pedestrian down-to-earth mini-horror. A sprinkling of peculiar events throughout people's lives that they seem to simply live with, especially since there's commonly a lack of immediate threat. I take it these are supposed to be the seeds, but there's not really any anxiety. SoA is clearly this way by design, you're barely given any time to engage with it and even then many chapters don't show results, just vague openness. There's a much longer SoA+ with over a hundred chapters and then SoA＊, but I've no interest in it.PTSD Radio (ancient big horrors)
Same methods, but I liked it much better. Unlike SoA, it's quite a bit more menacing with all body horror it employs and goes beyond mere implications, his ugliest creatures and moments are from here. It's a wildly non-linear story, jumping across different eras, characters, and even viewpoints of the same occurrences, splitting apart even a single sequence of events and interspersing them with one-offs and other arcs, but thanks to the iterated elements that tie these incidents together across the centuries you can see the development of this pervasive malevolence in its pursuing of villagers, their descendants, and anyone who interacts with them. It's Shinto, of course.
It is very much building up towards a resolution with its gradual reveals, but sadly the author dropped it due to the spooky horror things happening to him IRL which he illustrates at the end of the volumes, like his blood clotting and immune system going kaput. There's also some jazz about reordering the chapters and looking at the ones that have the same frequency but it's really not worth it. Anyways, although it wasn't my favorite the radio still has some good tunes to play. It's neat. No.124094
Now, THIS, this is the real shit: Kago Shintarou.
His genre of choice is what's accurately called "ero-guro nonsense," (literally nansensu) with stories that range from one-shots to two volumes at most. His work contains ample amounts of rape, amputation, disemboweling, coprophilia, skinning, childbirth, and subsequently dead babies, in whichever order you prefer, though, again, it's surreal, meta, humorous and mostly not as bad as a truly hideous eromanga. (Makes it hard to post samples when so many pages contain this, however.) What it made me feel was a queer kind of uneasiness coupled with gay chuckles.
One particular theme of his that comes up a lot and that I quite enjoyed is the mechanization of butchered bodies, as in using them as part of or converting into a contraption. Take Kagayaite!'s fascist Japan, making women into giantesses and exploiting them as beasts of burden, not just lifting and pushing stuff around but also carrying cargo in their rectum, uterus, and bladder, launching explosives from their bleeding anuses, while butchering, splicing them into monstruous war machines powered by oral sex, cannibalism, and the Japanese spirit (which physically repulses gaijin liberalism). Giantess-machine hybrids are also employed in Super-Powered Mongolia Invasion and Super-Conductive Brains although it's framed quite differently. A more mundane case is a detective ripping out her own eye and inserting various everyday ingredients into another woman to fashion an impromptu camera for obtaining evidence after being stripped of all her belongings and thrown in a cell.
In his short stories, often 16 to 20 pages long and of which he's drawn tons and tons, he gets endless mileage from a deceptively simple method: start with a random concept, scale it up through a barrage of twists, and end with its maximum expression, it gets a lot of bang for its buck. You find girls committing seppuku for fun and whipping each other with their intestines, a world where people can separate their bodies in two, a building of nightmares stacked on nightmares, perversion at a funeral whose location people can't seem to find, two gods having a battle of petty geneses, an underground addiction to using erasers, it's all a magnificent delusion that's kinda hard to spoil because of how densely packed his developments are. And he continously sticks the landing! There's a heavy element of meta too, self-referentiality as in Fraction, working with the medium in Abstraction, Multiplication, or another whose name I forget meditating on the nature of halves, and a decent amount of parodying manga tropes. Kago himself appears as a character in more than one story and gets even more meta.
His drawing style varies from nearly photorealistic to cartoony, it depends on what he's trying to do in that particular story. Though you know, what's really strange is his paneling: in a lot of his work it's often as simple as it could possibly be, even simpler and more rigid than Umezu's, yet when he breaks from it he demonstrates his ability to completely transcend any sort of formatting. Very peculiar choice to structure his manga that way.
Overall his work is extremely Japanese, yet interestingly somewhat anti-otaku as he repeatedly makes fun of it. Closest is Harem End, but its twist premise is quickly flipped around. What I'd recommend is Mongolia and Dementia 21, the latter being by far his cleanest longform work but still terribly surreal and with the captivating theme of... old people, he goes quite far with it. I flinched my way through Dream Toy Factory with all the nasty non-fun stuff it has, and Korokoro Soushi is on the heavier end of things as well, so much cannibalism and torture. Dude can reach the depths of R18G-NSFL when he wants to, thankfully he generally prioritizes absurdism over pure disgust. (I prefer the fetuses when they're comedic.) All in all, he's an excellent artist and I earnestly recommend him. I immensely enjoyed reading his stuff.
No.124095
In light of all that has been reviewed above, I think it's time to some notes on perhaps the best known horror manga even if so many people have read it, to use as a measuring stick, horror par excellence. You don't really need me to post an image of it.
Uzumaki
Uzumaki does something very, very unique: its threat doesn't come from men, man-made horrors, curses, gods, or any individual monster, what conspires against the town is a form, an ideal shape indiscriminately manifesting torture upon everything, from people to buildings, to vehicles, to the climate. All will be restructured accordingly regardless of resistance, and these capricious forces will rise again. You cannot stop it. You cannot escape. It won't let you.
The motif allows for very unique body horror, where humans warp into shapes that are alien to them but recognizable, without requiring gore to serve as shock material. Of course, Ito does employ some gore in the scar chapter, the vampiric pregnancy arc, and a little with Shuichi's hospitalized mother, which I don't find as viscerally horrifying as Rusted Scissors or Kago's work but it's still terribly well done, creative, and iconic.
It does a better job at portraying a wasteland and human behavior than Drifting Classroom, with just a few chapters. Most of townspeople grow distressed at the destruction and ensuing lack of space, but they don't stoop down to killing each other mindlessly. The kids that went around blowing things away for fun get tied up as self defense, but not sacrificed. Even as it's all coming down, they still display decency. You could say that the gangs do so as well, actually offering the protagonists the chance to join them and sharing food rather than immediately attempting murder like it happens in DC.
The eating of snail people is interesting when you compare it to cannibalism proper. That they transform and truly stop being human has been well established, as well as it happening now semi-randomly due to ramped-up spiral influence, so treating them as just a thing now requires no leap for them. Real cannibalism is fatal, it requires much more build-up and true desperation for it to be believable, but with snails there's a distance to it. It allows the characters to partake in it while maintaining uneasiness, and one of the last chapters logically applies the transformation to a child they care about, again displaying enduring decency and humanity in trying to help him reach safety as a final act of respect and kindness, contrasted with the other group that has fully let go of their inhibitions.
All this horror made me remember The Anthill and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, and maaaan bugs used to frighten me so damn much. Re-read that shit and the stupid fucking snails still fucking get me. Poe and Lovecraft are still masters, too. I also read Hideout, which is utter fucking trash. Half of its time is spent on the MC's sad flashbacks, the other half is being chased by a hideous old hobo straight out of an eromanga through nondescript caves and bunker corridors. Its retarded cheapness offends me.
But enough of that, it's about time I uninstalled tachiyomi. Further kyoumi ga nai, na~i, na~i, nai hito darake no shokutaku de... although I'll check Ito's other work for sure. In the future. Other authors mentioned as truly great horror mangaka are Suehiro Maruo (pic) and Hideshi Hino (dopey stuff), but I think it'd be better for me to go and read other genres for now. I have no idea why I went on this tangent in the first place, but for the moment I've freed myself from this venture. It wasn't too bad.
No.124480
>>124192Ooo ye, I read that, pretty fun - not much happens but it's nice.
I did only really finished it because it's quite short, wish it had a stronger story but aw well
No.124972
reading kakushigoto
it's funny
No.124980
>>124978Dear lord every single page of this posted here is just thick hag-service. It's amazing.
No.124984
>>124978>>124981How is the story for this? The premise didn't really interest me but all of the pictures of it make my nutbladder aching hurt.
No.129398
We do kind of have a manga thread although it doesn't really jump out and say it right away
>>87056 No.129399
>>129398the OP could be edited to add it as a title maybe
No.129400
>>129397Additionally, I've only just finished Shigahime (It's not too long). I saved many a'pages throughout. Interestingly, the story was insistent on not leaving characters alone, Souichi in particular. I'm no good with analysis and such but he continued to receive the short end of the stick. I'm not completely sure why though - perhaps he is simply a victim of Miwako's selfishness?
>>129398Fair fair, I did vaguely remember something but couldn't find anything related after quite a few pages - or I missed it :p
No.129404
bump since moving posts doesn't bump
No.129405
>>129397>>129400Someone recommended Chainsaw Man to me two-three weeks ago, especially with its most recent highlight, and I decided to read Goodbye Eri as a sample of Fujimoto's work. It's really interesting, it reads like a movie. Not just because it's all composed of these camera shots that the MC is filming in-universe, but because its density of text is low, while it constantly dedicates multiple panels to consecutive momevements, small and subtle changes in people's expressions or gestures, rather than jumping from one moment to another and having you fill in the blanks. Pic in other manga would often serve as punctuation and focus on an important moment but here it's an average page, at least half of them are like this. They're also grouped, in the sense that one page will depict a set of tied moments and it's only inbetween pages that big cuts occur. All of its composition is really clever overall.
The story is by no means bad either, it hit me in the feels and it's suprising how it packs multiple twists and meta in what is otherwise a fairly short read (200 quick pages). The ending is basically perfect, too. There's nothing about it I would change, nothing at all.
I also read Child of God by the Nishioka siblings and was a neat kind of artsy edge, although people were lambasting it for it. I downloaded their other manga too for later.
>ShigahimeWhat did you think of it? It's the first time I've heard of it.
No.129415
>>129406Have you considered slowing yourself down? I always regret speed reading, manga series are so much better when you take some time
No.129416
>>129405Ooo ye, the strong use of subtle expressions isn't seen too commonly in manga - especially with how characters are portrayed acting (or perhaps they aren't? :P)
I think Fire punch is my favourite series from him, incredible characters with an amazing story direction.
I read Ajin around that time too - similarly, and something I really like in a manga, is a classic story arc with beginning, middle, and end. I do like epics with lots of arcs too though :>
No.129877
File:21.png (749.52 KB,1115x1600)
The new Tower chapter was preeeetty action packed. I'm still not sure about the tone of the manga, I feel like I would like it more if it was less lighthearted.
No.129878
>>129587Reading a manga like this week by week is probably a mistake, the pacing obviously isn't designed for it. I won't stop though, I love the drama too much
No.131128
>>131113This is one of the things that keeps me from being an "ongoing" manga reader apart from just being bad at remembering to read stuff. There would need to be a Taiga thing for manga that autodownloads or something and then a pop-up tells me that it happened. But, if something updates 3 months later (or worse) I can't just jump back into it. I'm going to forget important stuff!
I'm going to read some Puniru chapters and...
Oh wait, the Kernel Scanlations only goes up to Chapter 4.
Well, I guess I'm done with it then. It's cute and a little bit humorous, but I'm not sure how much I can judge it after only 4 short chapters. I think this cute SoL stuff is far more enjoyable in anime form so I'm fine waiting for adaptation to land.
No.131135
>>131022I can't believe they
actually had sex, got up from my seat when that happened.
All in all, great manga. Interesting how it doesn't really have a main plot around which everything revolves around, it's more like a couple dozen characters having their own ongoing stories whose plotlines intersect.
For example, the government has put a mole into the mercerado operation that's taking place in this faraway island (that's the horny druggie who's let herself go). They give some mercerado to the frustrated mangaka next door, getting him hooked. But this operation has opponents besides the government, so an assassin comes in to take them out, who during his preparation period meets with a separate assassin that is chasing a different mark across their own plotline. He succeeds in taking the farmers down, but then faces a new problem when he's trapped by a local serial killer. And now that the operation has been dismantled the mangaka suddenly can't afford the drug's higher price, and so must overcome his addiction with the help of a neighboring ghost. This is only a fraction of what goes on in its three volumes.
There isn't any central element here, nothing is fixed in place, but it flows exceedingly well just from these people inhabiting the same space and pursuing whatever it is they're looking for. The design, at a structural level, is impeccable.
And it's absurd, it has SEXO, droghe, mort, terribly unexpected twists, et PræCūra, but these unrestrained wacky things its bold characters pull do in fact impact these plotlines in serious ways. It's not simply comedic, you gotta appreciate that.
It's not only dense in its plot, but in its visuals too: it's exceedingly hard to find a page with three panels or less, and in the whole of its three volumes there is only a single spread, this being its penultimate page. Perhaps 90% of its pages have between 5 and 7 panels, the other maybe 10% featuring 4, and each panel has a shape different from the rest. Tons and tons of diagonals and varying sizes. The character designs have a stilized flatness devoid of gradients that gets it compared quite regularly to Kumeta and SZS, and a lot of its backgrounds are outright blank, although it manages to fit in quite well. Deceptively dialogue-heavy too, that at least for me made this feel unexpectedly slow but not in a bad way.
Consistently irreverent and lethal in impactful ways, very good stuff. I also read Suicide Parabellum, a single volume of multilayered yuri mindfuckery with a brilliant ending, and How Many Light-Years to Babylon?, another great pile of twisting buggery. You know the pic about the English knowing the pain of getting their food made of? It's from there, chapter 22. Overall Dowman's work reminded me of
>>124094 a good deal but it's far more lighthearted, I'll see about reading other works of his.