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!

The Manuscript Found In Saragossa

Thus, our journey into books begins with a novel that I have been obsessing over for a good couple of years, albeit mostly in a distant way. Like, watching The Adventures of Baron Munchausenon TV when you're a kid and holding certain scenes close to your heart for years and years after but completely forgetting what movie it was. Yes, that happened to me. It always happens to me with Terry Gilliam films for some reason... Brazilwas another one. Anyway, yes. Now we've understood the concept of 'faraway obsession', let us begin to tackle this sprawling novel.

I picked up this book quite by accident in the library and was completely entranced by it for two weeks before totally forgetting what the author and title of the book was. Then, I searched the same place in the library, found it again, and forgot again. And this happened yet again. And again. Until one day, over the course of many years, I took it upon myself to sit down and memorize the title until the words were burned into my brain. THE. MANUSCRIPT. FOUND. IN. SARAGOSSA. BY. JAN. POTOCKI. Yes!

Ah! And now we can begin talking about the book! The book! The book! Oh my! Oh oh! Okay!

Having been brought up on a diet of Dostoyevskyand Tolstoyhas gotten me used to novels with IN YOUR FACE CONCEPTS and plots which conform quite closely to the message the writer wishes to convey. Don't get me wrong, I'm not painting any of this in a negative light, they do it well. With style and pizazz and a lot of passion. But that said, it's easy to understand how something like The Manuscript Found in Saragossawas a shock to my system.

The plot of this novel, if the word 'novel' can contain such an epic, starts with a manuscript found in Saragossa during the war which tells the tale of one Alphonse van Worden who is traveling through Spain and his subsequent adventures and dealings with people he meets along the way. And their adventures and dealings with other people, in the past. And the adventures of these people and the people they met. And the adventures of these people... and so on and so forth. It is hard to say the plot 'revolves around' something because it honestly doesn't. The Manuscript Found in Saragossais built more like a Russian doll with tales within tales within tales. Some which connect, some which do not, some with the same themes, some without any themes, some which are completely fantastical, some bordering on prosaic.

Although this 'style' (I think there are too few books utilizing this 'frame narrative' kind of structure to merit a 'genre' ALTHOUGH IT SHOULD BE A GENRE BECAUSE I LOVE IT) has been used to great effect in The Arabian Nightsand to pretty-good-but-maybe-not-so-great effect in The Decameron, I think The Manuscript Found in Saragossais a totally different ball game if only because of the MASSIVE CONFUSION the SHEER NUMBERS of INTERTWINING STORIES evokes. Whereas in the other books, the frame narrative is more to provide context, in The Manuscript, there are SO MANY FRAME NARRATIVES that the frames lose their meaning and melts into... into... maybe the closest word I can find for it is LIFE.

How I came to that conclusion... please, just imagine I explained to you my thought process and it's logical.

Whereas Tolstoyanishbooks aim to be ONE THING to ALL MEN (like encapsulating and EMBODYING universal aspects of the human struggle in a single tale), The Manuscript Found in Saragossais ALL THINGS to NO MEN. It is an orgy of ghosts and bandits and priests and prostitutes and their superstitious stories which, though seeming fantastical to us now, would have actually been more realistic in ye olden times of superstition. In short, they seem very much like stories that folk of that period would have told each other. And they are just stories. No reason or rhyme, just a bunch of stories which snake around each other like... like... MONSTERS.

I can't go on! I can't go on! Even writing about this book, I'm losing myself in the forking, twisting paths of my own mind!!!

ARGH. Just buy it now and read for yourself!! But beware!! This book will haunt you forever!! THIS BOOK WILL SEE YOU IN HELL!!!