If you're looking for me, you'll find me perusing the shelves of local stores in search of the next great manga series.
If you're looking at my bookshelf, you'll see I have spent too much disposable income on books containing spiky haired people with comically large swords.
If you're reading this, here is a rundown of some manga and artbooks worth a look.
Ibitsu by Haruto Ryo
Published by Yen Press
Japanese horror tends to be both weird and excessively gory and “Ibitsu” is no exception. A creepy looking girl in gothic lolita clothing sits by a trash pile in an alleyway and asks a passing young man whether he has a sister. When she gets the answer, she then asks if she can be his little sister. Whether he answers yes or no, the results are a stalker with a terrifying smile and a plushie dripping with viscous fluid dropping by your home uninvited and making your life a living nightmare.
“Ibitsu” is a riff on classic Japanese urban legends but adds a serial killer twist. Characters slowly lose their minds as this persistent little sister want-to-be kills and tortures, all while acting like an obsessive insane yandere.
The art is pretty good and the story, while generic and with a mildly interesting twist, doesn’t ever go anywhere. This is more about the slow build-up to the psychological torture and brutal violence and those moments are very effective. It makes this 400-page tome a tense read that I found hard to put down.
Steam Reverie in Amber by Kuroimori
Published by SEVEN SEAS
An art book with a loose story concerning a young woman on a zeppelin that serves as a kind of bookstore for those lucky enough to climb aboard, “Steam Reverie in Amber” is a gorgeous tome full of beautiful portraits and diagrams emphasizing steampunk aesthetics. Ranging from the signs of the zodiac as anime-esque girls and the major arcana of the tarot drawn in the artist’s unique style. Lacking much in the way of depth or reason to invest in its world, this is an artbook well worth owning if you’re a fan of these kinds of books.
Blue Lock by Maneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura
Published by Kodansha
300 of Japan's top high school soccer strikers are taken to a facility called Blue Lock to compete, train, and ultimately stand at the top of the heap as leaders of Japanese soccer attempt to create a beastly player to take the country to the World Cup.
Combining elements of traditional sports manga with those of death game scenarios (losers are pretty much banned from playing soccer afterward), Blue Lock has this soccer agnostic pining for more. The art is intense with character designs, action, and dialogue that adds an immediacy to every chapter. While none of the characters are particularly well-fleshed out the consistent action makes it easy to forgive any of those shortcomings. An absolute must-read for sports and shonen fans alike.
PTSD Radio by Masaaki Nakayama
Published by Kodansha
Fans of Junji Ito are in for a treat when picking up the beautifully illustrated PTSD Radio. A cult favorite in Japan, the manga is a series of connected vignettes centered on an angry deity wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting people of a town. As each short chapter jumps between characters and across time, we get a better sense of how this entity came to be, its abilities, and how it is terrorizing those unlucky enough to get in its path. Separating the chapters are flip-book style illustrations that come to a head at the end of the volume, faces that slowly come into focus across the entirety of the book until fully realizing their horrific disfigurations on the final splash page. It's a very unique presentation with a delightful way of slowly unfolding its story that comes at the cost of being too quick a read with little dialogue. It also falls into the pitfall of Junji Ito's work wherein many of the "scary" pages or reveals are too comical to be taken seriously. Some of the facial mutations are just hilarious in ways I don't think the author intended. But overall I think it's a great series worth a purchase for those who enjoy horror manga.
SINoALICE by Yoko Taro, Takuto Aoki, Himiko and Jino
Published by Square Enix
Rounding out this round-up is a manga that baffled me to a point I don't know whether I will continue it or not. Created by the madman who gave us one of my favorite video games of all time, Nier: Automata, SINoALICE follows a teenaged girl thrust into a death game scenario where the violence is as horrific as possible and the stakes are everything she has. Gorgeous art illustrates a story that I found pretty disturbing and unsavory. The majority of this focuses on the girls high school teacher sleeping with some of the students, leading one girl to commit suicide, somewhat like Anne's story in Persona 5. But here it feels gross and unnecessary and sours things by the time you get to the actual death game and the intense action you came to expect from the description on the back of the book. Plus you can read this in maybe fifteen minutes — there's not a lot of dialogue, nothing is particularly well explained and I'm expecting that it will take a number of volumes before anything makes sense. Yoko Taro is known for his mind-altering stories that take a lot of time to invest in to reach the best, most powerful moments but I don't know that SINoALICE is going to rank up there with his other works.
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Sean Newgent has been with KGUN9 since January of 2020 and is Good Morning Tucson's executive producer. He graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in broadcast journalism. He is a critic and cultural commentator. Share your story ideas and important issues with Sean by emailing sean.newgent@kgun9.com.
