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FEATURED BOOKS
Living Corpse: Hino
Horror #5
Black Cat: Hino Horror #6
by Hideshi Hino
Cocoro
Books,
2004
As
manga is becoming an increasingly hot property in the publishing
world, many companies are looking for the newest and hottest
Japanese series and artists to bring over to the US. Unfortunately
this means that American manga audiences are missing a lot of
the historical background of manga. Thankfully there are a few
companies that are willing to delve into manga’s rich
history and publish some of the medium’s older works.
For example, both Dark Horse and Vertical are both delving into
the back catalogue of “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka.
Although artist Hideshi Hino isn't nearly as famous as Tezuka,
Cocoro Books' work to bring over the “Hino Horror”
manga series is similarly admirable. (The two books under review,
Living Corpse and Black Cat, were originally
published in 1986 and 1979, respectively.)
Hino
is probably most infamous in the US as a film director for his
Mermaid in a Manhole and Flowers of Flesh and Blood
installments of the Guinea Pig horror/gore films. Flowers
of Flesh and Blood in particular received some notoriety
because actor Charlie Sheen reportedly thought that it was actually
a real snuff film and convinced the FBI to launch an investigation
into the film’s origins. However, before he became a film
director, Hino was a manga artist. (Flowers of Flesh and
Blood was actually based on one of his own manga stories.)
I’ve
never really been into horror as a genre so I thought I might
have a difficult time writing about Living Corpse and
Black Cat, installments five and six of the “Hino
Horror” series. That’s okay, though, because these
books aren’t really what I’d call “horror.”
Rather than trying to scare the reader, Living Corpse
and Black Cat are meditations on the human condition
expressed through grotesque imagery. Although my exposure to
Hino’s works has been fairly limited (a point I hope to
rectify in the future), through these two books I can begin
to see Hino as something as an existential philosopher.
Living
Corpse is about a man who, against all scientific explanations,
comes back to life after having drowned in the ocean. However,
he is now hideously deformed and decaying and must figure out
a way to cope with a world he does not understand and which
looks upon him with fright and revulsion. Black Cat
is a series of short vignettes on human nature from the point
of view of a wandering cat who has been shunned by most people
all of his life because they think he is an omen bad luck. In
both books, Hino is sympathetic to the society’s outsiders
and finds himself interested in how people behave and treat
each other. To quote the eponymous feline at the end of Black
Cat: “I must admit that I find no other creature
as fascinating as human beings. I’ll never grow tired
of studying them… They’re so strange…”
Living
Corpse and Black Cat were a pleasure to read.
Hino’s artwork is alternates between being baroque and
lightly cartoonish, a combination which does not sound like
it would work but which manages to succeed wonderfully. The
books are printed in the right-to-left format that is becoming
popular for English manga translations and they leave the Japanese
sound effects intact.
My
critiques of the books are superficial. I wasn’t particularly
fond of the comic sans font used for the dialogue in Living
Corpse (I preferred the font used in Black Cat)
and I thought that some of the more slang-y dialogue in both
books sounded overly British, using words like “cor,”
“blimey,” and “bint.” I thought that
the cover art could have been toned down as well, especially
on Living Corpse – it is distractingly colorful.
Although
these manga came out quite a while ago in Japan, they present
fascinating tales whose edge time has not blunted. Now I really
want to check out the rest of Hino’s manga oeuvre to see
if the rest of his stories are as intelligently written as these
two books.
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