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Wednesday, 31 January 2007 |
 | | ▪ | PUBLISHED BY: | | DARK HORSE | | | ▪ | ART/AUTHOR: | | TORU YAMAZAKI | | | | ▪ | FORMAT/COLOR: | | JAPANESE FORMAT / BW | | | ▪ | PAGES: | | 190 | | | ▪ | RATED: | | T 18+ | | | ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | | 09/29/2006 | | | ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | | 02/01/2007 | | | ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | | CHRISTOPHER SEAMAN |
It is gross. It panders to humor based on a fascination with bodily functions. It shocks. And then it inspires the reader with tales of love and courage that leaves one uplifted from the horrors in the earlier stories and going, “Oh, that Toru Yamazaki has done it again!”
Yes, we are talking about OCTOPUS GIRL- VOLUME THREE, featuring those slimy sistas of the sea, Takako and Sakae. These two women have an image problem no one would envy. Takako’s head may look normal, but when provoked, she can transform her body into that of an octopus! As for Sakae, her new best friend, she can transform her body into an eel. As they go from misadventure to misadventure, fighting off everyone from space aliens to the Vampire Granny who made her debut in the first volume, creepy characters and predictably nasty situations that are usually laced with black, gross humor abound. The non-related stories, “Super Ladies”, “The Premonition of Sorrow”, and “The Slit Mouthed Neighbor,” each tap into elements of the OCTOPUS GIRL style and themes, but stand alone as good reads in themselves. Pay special attention in particular to the last story, “The Slit Mouthed Neighbor”, which is one the best morality tales ever printed in these anthologies, holding a mirror up to society and the dark emotions and turns of heart that flow through our lives. Victims of teasing will relate to this tale, and the pain felt by the main character in the title. One suspects it is this twisted balance between the emotions wrought in these stories and the revulsion generated in the others that has made Yamazaki’s work so loved by fans in Japan, and has helped catapult him to success as a media personality there.
As with the previous volumes, anyone averse to pages of slimy gooey gore, and dripping eyes, runny noses, and excreted bodily fluids of all descriptions will find the manga really hard to deal with. However, if you read it with the same spirit hard core viewers of horror films view their cinematic fare, you can put the whole thing in context and actually get to some of really of the humor and – It still bears repeating, the look of the manga reminds me of the kind of art seen in American underground comix (sic), with heavy outlines on the characters, big toothy mouths stretched to grotesque proportions, bulging eyes and weirdly distorted figures. The artist/author has likely studied these works, among others, as reference in designing the look of his manga. Fetishists will probably get some jokes somewhere that may elude more mainstream readers like this reviewer.
Having said that, OCTOPUS GIRL remains mostly about alienation and victimization, horror and revenge, and the characters who feel it or inflict it on others.
IN SUMMARY:
OCTOPUS GIRL: VOLUME THREE is a platter of bizarre horror vignettes served up raw thanks to the uncompromisingly unique vision of creator Toru Yamazaki. Shock and awe abound from cover to cover as aliens and alienation come under scrutiny from the artist/writer of these twisted tales. Not just full of terrors down the toilet, there are stories in this manga that are also as rich in compassion as they are ripe with horror in all its forms. |
