The Pathfinder has unearthed three new manga releases for you that deserve your full attention. You will discover a safe bet from a master of horror, but also two new series in the “seinen” category (for young adults).
1 Love and Death
He comes back regularly in our columns, the one we call the master of horror manga, This is Junji, is in the spotlight in February at the publisher Mangetsu. Published in a luxurious large format of over 400 pages that brings together five different blood-chilling stories, Love and Death is a perfect gateway to discover the sinister universe of this author.
The title of the book corresponds to the first story, which occupies a good part of this work, once morest the backdrop of an urban legend that is both bloody and passionate. It revolves around the silhouette of a mysterious young man who appears through the mist when passers-by wonder regarding their sentimental future. But what was initially just an innocent game through a simple clairvoyance ritual will result in dozens of deaths.
How to explain these processions of uninterrupted suicides and, above all, how to put an end to them? Love and Death skillfully maintains the mystery while marking the spirits with shocking images of which only Junji Ito has the secret. The other short stories that follow one another in the second part of this book are not unworthy either.
We stay in the theme of love that leads to the most abominable death, but the plots are sufficiently renewed to captivate the reader until the end. No matter how hard we try to find a favorable outcome to all these stories, they inevitably end in the most sordid way possible by involving tortured or insane individuals whose paths it is better never to cross.
What regarding this hysterical sibling whose macabre acts go faster than thought? Of this house eaten away by invisible pains that must be massaged in the air as if they existed? Or even this girl convinced that she will refine her silhouette by having her ribs removed? Everything is so absurd that we let ourselves be drawn without realizing it into this absolute dive into horror which well deserved such a beautiful edition.
2 Ender Geister: The Ultimate Exorcist
End ghosts is a new manga series which is a hit in Japan and which will speak directly to action movie lovers. It is signed Takashi Yomoyama and published in France by Glénat. It all begins in Johannesburg, South Africa, when a young woman stops, with a simple snap of her fingers, a massacre perpetrated by a strange individual who sows death around him… She then offers him to become his disciple and to train him as an exorcist.
A surprising starting point, to say the least, which serves above all to introduce the hero of the series, Michael, a German exorcist whom we then find ten years later. He is on a mission around the world to stop the abuses committed by man-eating monsters.
Important detail: all these creatures come from the classic repertoire of the fantastic bestiary (ogres, kobolds, witches, tengus) and evolve in a reality that has shifted into the most total supernatural. Sent on a mission to Japan, our exorcist, a big fan of cinema, will take the pseudonym of the famous filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and become the “black shooter”.
In addition to its stylish and hectic character, this modern manga intrigues with its macabre universe and its hero endowed with amazing extrasensory abilities. Not only can he materialize weapons at will, but he also knows how to be elegant in the way he acts and interacts with others, be they friend or foe.
His mission partner doesn’t have much to envy, excelling as much in the art of combat as in the use of state-of-the-art high-tech equipment. As for the references to the world of cinema (Clint EastwoodZatoichi, Pulp Fiction, Inception, Matrix, James Bond…), they are fun and bring a bit of lightness to the whole, just like the overflowing passion of the hero for Japanese culture.
According to the French publisher, the series already has 600,000 sales in its country of origin and goes out of stock with each publication of a bound volume. However, it started only in digital format, but was so successful that the mangaka was able to see it published in paper version.
A very good sign for this title which already has seven volumes in Japan and the first two of which will be released simultaneously on February 15 in France. This is also not trivial, because the end of the second volume joins precisely the beginning of the first to bring even more relief to this decidedly very mysterious exorcist.
3 Bump or die!
First announced for February 24 by naBan editions, the series Bump or die! finally saw its release postponed to March 10, but will be launched with the first two volumes simultaneously. It is produced by the authors Atsushi Kamakura and Akira Rei, the first taking care of the scenario, the second of the drawings.
The manga opens with the example of a young man who has not been part of society for too long, a 25-year-old wreck who finds himself charged with “crime of professional inactivity”… under the Reprogramming of Inactive Persons Law! The tone is set, Bump or Die! is a six-volume thriller that denounces the failings of an alternative Japanese society in which the hunt for the unemployed has taken on worrying proportions.
Any individual who has not worked for more than six months becomes a burden on society and must be rehabilitated in camps to undergo brainwashing supposed to make him ultra-productive. Promulgated six years earlier, the law of the Reprogramming of the inactive consists of erasing their memory to implant new memories in them and make them real workaholics.
But this is not the only punishment reserved for those shipwrecked in society… If voices were raised immediately, the economic recovery that this law generated quickly silenced the disputes. It is in this context that the reader will follow the torments of another man, a young graduate sure of himself, at first very favorable to the system whose merits he had praised until then, before becoming part of it himself. victim and to completely revise his judgment.
Worse still, the treatment he witnesses is so brutal and humiliating that he realizes he has only one choice: kill or be killed. And succeed in getting out of it at all costs, even if it means sacrificing others. Convinced of having been the target of a plot, he is one of those unfortunate people who have not simply been “reprogrammed” but who have been sent to forced labor camps in inhumane conditions, when they are not simply shot down by their guards.
And the latter make it a point of honor to recycle waste into model citizens without the slightest consideration for them. Violent and raw, this manga is to be reserved for an informed public. However, it addresses topical issues to denounce the excesses of a system in which the hunt for the unemployed takes on inhuman proportions. Be careful though if you want to discover this manga only for its critical aspect, it also dwells at length on the descriptions of the abuse suffered by the prisoners and is therefore not to be placed in everyone’s hands.