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Friday, June 04, 2004 ( 6/04/2004 02:24:00 PM ) Bill S. SIXTY MINUTE MANGA – (Episode Fourteen: It's not just horror; it's Hino Horror!) As I've continued my explorations into manga, one name that's regularly popped up in considerations of horror manga is Hideshi Hino. A prolific writer/artist, with more than 150 titles to his name, Hino is apparently such a familiar brand name that when Cocoro Books recently initiated its American translations of his work, they chose to call the series Hino Horror – attaching a number to each title, even though the first two releases, at least, don't really connect as a series. After reading the first two books of Hino Horror recently (The Red Snake and The Bug Boy), I've gotta admit they're some damn strange manga. Unlike most of the Japanese graphic novels released in this country, neither volume has an age recommendation on its cover. Though from the cover of Red Snake (a Beardsley-like image of a young girl in the throes of ecstasy with a quartet of snakes winding in and out of her robe), it's clear that this is not a tale for kids. Inside Snake, we get visions of blood-&-pus, graphic dismemberments and body violation, plus some evocatively creepy (though largely implied) sex. Plenty disturbing stuff, but what somewhat tempers it is Hino's drawing style, which has an element of cartoonishness (both it and Bug Boy feature leads who resemble Charles Addams kids – with large button eyes that bulge outlandishly and look ready to pop out of their sockets at any moment) that at times made me think of American comic primitives like Mark Beyer or the late Rory Hayes (who used to populate his horror undergrounds with crudely drawn teddy bear protagonists). If some of this material were too realistically rendered, it'd probably be unbearable. Snake is narrated by one of Hino's deer-in-headlight kids: a young boy who lives with the rest of his Lynchian family in a labyrinthine house stuck in the middle of a foreboding forest. Our unnamed hero wanders through the house, spying on his family who each are involved in unsettling activities (his sister, the sexually evocative figure we see on the cover, is obsessed with creepy-crawlies; his grandfather and mother have a daily rite where the woman walks on a large lump attached to the old man's face to squeeze out the infection; his senile grandmother believes that she is a chicken and nests in one of the house’s many rooms, while his father gets an excessive thrill from lopping off the heads of chickens) and regularly returning to an ominous looking mirror. Beyond that mirror, the boy's grandfather asserts, is a land "more wicked than hell" itself (the line is repeated, which makes you wonder just how much the grandfather knows about hell). After he dreams about walking through that same mirror, a crack appears in the glass. Not long after, a massive red snake appears in the house, slithering out from within the sister's futon and biting her on the leg. From there, catastrophic event piles upon catastrophic event as each of the boy's family members is transformed, disfigured and/or killed in turn. (Gramma, for example, becomes a - shades of Freaks! - squawking bird/woman.) The boy ends up fleeing into the mirror, which gives Hino the opportunity to go to town with the stygian imagery. Our hero finally reaches the Gates of Hell, where he has an inevitable confrontation with the ominous Red Snake. The lead of Bug Boy also inadvertantly initiates the story's horror: not through dreaming or voyeuristic behavior, but from some dark part of his inner being. A sickly loner more at home with animals than either his classmates or family, young Sanpei becomes a monster after vomiting up a huge red bug, which stings him and starts a long painful transmogrification that makes what Jeff Goldblum underwent in Cronenberg's The Fly look like a simple overnight makeover. Disgusted by the creature he has now become, a giant-sized caterpillar-like bug with spines, his family attempts to kill him. But Sanpei escapes and makes his way out into the world. Unlike the first person narration of the first graphic novel, The Bug Boy is told by an omniscient narrator almost as if he were telling a fable. The BBoy grows more monstrous as the story progresses, developing poisonous appendages and a taste for killing humans. He takes revenge on a trio of school bullies but does not, interestingly, enact anything on his appalling family. One of the last images he "remembers," in fact, turns out to be a false one of the happy times he had with his siblings and parents. Hino is even broader with his art strokes on this outing: a few of the secondary figures (most notably, a city drunk who appears more than once) have the hyperbolized look of art comics guys like Mark Newgarden or Kaz, while some of the more "realistic" pages invoking nature and the young boy’s animal companions have an ironic sentimentalism. As a killer insect, our hero has an expressive baby face that also looks like something Charles Burns might've concocted. As with most monster stories, Bug Boy does not end well for the titular hero. If Snake works with the surreal logic of a child's nightmare, Sanpei's tale is more simple and straightforward; it moves remorselessly toward our doomed hero's fate. Both of the first two Hino Horror entries seem to circle around the theme of family cruelty. The publisher, in its artist bio, makes a point of noting that the manga creator grew up "in the immediate post-war landscape of Tokyo," in an attempt to explain his visual fascination with physical transformation and deformity. Me, I also wonder what his childhood family life was like. On the basis of his first two American translations, I'm definitely intrigued by Hideshi Hino. I can easily see plenty of manga newcomers being turned off by this stuff, though – by its blend of art comics and mainstream manga storytelling, its grim take on childhood and downbeat tone. (Both books contain moments that'll have even hardened horror hounds turning back the page and going, Whoa, what'd I just see there?) I think they'll be missing something special, but, then, I keep foolishly trying to convince my wife she'll really like David Cronenberg, too. . . # | |
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