post #2!

(cross-posted to my Live Journal)

It's Halloween, so I thought I'd post some art by Hideshi Hino. I don't follow alot of manga, but I try to look out for good horror titles because Japan, generally, has that horror shit locked down (what's up with every single American horror comic looking like this, anyway? Do people seriously find that appealing?)

Hino's Bug Boy is probably my all-time favourite piece of horror fiction, so I've never understood why his name isn't brought up in more discussions about horror manga. His artwork has that same horrible/cute balance that's made Junko Mizuno so popular. . . He's been putting out work since 1967, and a number of his comics have been put to film (including one piece he directed himself for Guinea Pigs, a Japanese series so brutal that Charlie Sheen mistook one of the installments for a snuff film. Now, Japan's made it illegal to have a movie with "Guinea Pigs" in its title, so. . . Nice going, Charlie Sheen. Keep up the good work.)

Typical Hino stories play up the everyday traumas of modern life - social isolation, dilapidated towns, unaffected parents. In Bug Boy, a family's dinner is interrupted by their limbless, bandaged, mutant son, dripping in amniotic fluid and moaning in pain. His father's response is "Look at the mess you're making on the floor!" In Oninbo and the Bugs From Hell, an infant tries to strangle its mother while breastfeeding.

Here:




It's funny and cruel and disgusting, which is, like, what horror should be.