Uziga Waita VS Suehiro Maruo! Guro death match!
Ummm.... Do I have to read something to review it? I wanted to review some guro manga tonight but I couldn't get through Uziga Waita's Death Panda. I know! Let's just do a quick run-through of some of the artists I am familiar with and choose the best one!
Ichi wacha mucho la! Who's the best guro mangaka?
Well, like I said, I couldn't get through Uziga Waita's Death Panda. With a title like Death Panda you'd expect me to like it, right? Right? The first chapter is about a panda who kills people in gruesome ways! A panda! How can anyone not like it?
BALDERDASH!
And let me tell you why.
Uziga Waita's work has the dubious honor of being the only guro manga I've ever gagged at. It wasn't that it was 'too graphic' or whatever nonsense like that, no. I mean, gore is gore is gore and the more graphic the better and besides, his style is soooo anime-like it's sickening, however my introduction to him was through this manga entitled Schoolgirl In Concrete which was a fictionalized dramatization of an actual incident in Japan where some crazy teenagers caught a girl and tortured her to death over a month or so. I was semi-aware of the incident and knew that most of the tortures depicted actually happened and although it's not THAT wild (like, say, compared to de Sade), the overall style of the thing was so inherently exploitative that I gagged at the indignity of it all. It was as if he was trying to back up his torture fetish with some kind of philosophical moral pornographer crap.
And so it is with Death Panda. Yes, yes, it's supposed to be funny... BUT IT'S NOT! This guy just likes drawing people getting tortured and humiliated and the way he enjoys it comes through so clearly in his art. It's a lascivious, leery, yucky kind of enjoyment that is just... not... ugh... graceful? And no amount of teh (fake) funniez is going to hide it!
Compare this to Suehiro Maruo's work with its natural poetry. Maruo can draw people eating each other's excrement and there'll still be something poignant about the whole thing. There is no sense of exploitation, just... expression.
Let's talk a bit about Maruo, since I already picked him out as my favourite 4evaz gur0 mangakA.
My first Maruo was a compilation of shorts entitled Rose-coloured Monster. From the very first page, you can see that it's something entirely different. The art strikes somewhere between Japanese woodcut and Fritz Lang film. A lethal combination, to be sure. The stories are... kind of nutty in a silly way but man, it's all about the art! The way he juxtaposes certain elements in such an elegant way... It's beautiful. One chapter in particular, The Secret and Sad Story of the Camelia Girl, manages to convey the kind of madness Fritz Lang portrayed in M from another, more extreme angle. In a few short pages, with almost zero character development and a thin excuse for a plot, one manages to get a sense of how absurd the world really is. It feels like a lot of negativity smushed into a crucible and heated up until it comes out a gem. When one reads Maruo, one feels like the more he sinks into the mire, the more beautiful the world is.
Or is it just me?
Anyway I wish I could talk more about a couple more guys, Jun Hayami, Juan Gotoh, Shintaro Kago and the non-guro-man-but-my-second-favourite-next-to-Maruo - Machino Henmaru, but I think it's time for me to sleep/play more games. This whole thing has turned into an indictment of Waita and lauding of Maruo anyway.
So, sleep tight! And don't take shit in your tea while enjoying your Maruo!
Ichi wacha mucho la! Who's the best guro mangaka?
Well, like I said, I couldn't get through Uziga Waita's Death Panda. With a title like Death Panda you'd expect me to like it, right? Right? The first chapter is about a panda who kills people in gruesome ways! A panda! How can anyone not like it?
BALDERDASH!
And let me tell you why.
Uziga Waita's work has the dubious honor of being the only guro manga I've ever gagged at. It wasn't that it was 'too graphic' or whatever nonsense like that, no. I mean, gore is gore is gore and the more graphic the better and besides, his style is soooo anime-like it's sickening, however my introduction to him was through this manga entitled Schoolgirl In Concrete which was a fictionalized dramatization of an actual incident in Japan where some crazy teenagers caught a girl and tortured her to death over a month or so. I was semi-aware of the incident and knew that most of the tortures depicted actually happened and although it's not THAT wild (like, say, compared to de Sade), the overall style of the thing was so inherently exploitative that I gagged at the indignity of it all. It was as if he was trying to back up his torture fetish with some kind of philosophical moral pornographer crap.
And so it is with Death Panda. Yes, yes, it's supposed to be funny... BUT IT'S NOT! This guy just likes drawing people getting tortured and humiliated and the way he enjoys it comes through so clearly in his art. It's a lascivious, leery, yucky kind of enjoyment that is just... not... ugh... graceful? And no amount of teh (fake) funniez is going to hide it!
Compare this to Suehiro Maruo's work with its natural poetry. Maruo can draw people eating each other's excrement and there'll still be something poignant about the whole thing. There is no sense of exploitation, just... expression.
Let's talk a bit about Maruo, since I already picked him out as my favourite 4evaz gur0 mangakA.
My first Maruo was a compilation of shorts entitled Rose-coloured Monster. From the very first page, you can see that it's something entirely different. The art strikes somewhere between Japanese woodcut and Fritz Lang film. A lethal combination, to be sure. The stories are... kind of nutty in a silly way but man, it's all about the art! The way he juxtaposes certain elements in such an elegant way... It's beautiful. One chapter in particular, The Secret and Sad Story of the Camelia Girl, manages to convey the kind of madness Fritz Lang portrayed in M from another, more extreme angle. In a few short pages, with almost zero character development and a thin excuse for a plot, one manages to get a sense of how absurd the world really is. It feels like a lot of negativity smushed into a crucible and heated up until it comes out a gem. When one reads Maruo, one feels like the more he sinks into the mire, the more beautiful the world is.
Or is it just me?
Anyway I wish I could talk more about a couple more guys, Jun Hayami, Juan Gotoh, Shintaro Kago and the non-guro-man-but-my-second-favourite-next-to-Maruo - Machino Henmaru, but I think it's time for me to sleep/play more games. This whole thing has turned into an indictment of Waita and lauding of Maruo anyway.
So, sleep tight! And don't take shit in your tea while enjoying your Maruo!
posted by palehorsesailor at
10:47 AM
3 Comments:
Is this the same Death Panda?
http://japansugoi.com/wordpress/death-panda-%e3%83%87%e3%82%b9%e3%83%91%e3%83%b3%e3%83%80/
Oh, if Death Panda bothered you, you've only just noticed the tip of the iceberg. ;3
Jun Hayami is a step higher with the erotic grotesque-ness than Maruo, and his atmosphere and works I find to be far more realistic.
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