Exhibition review: Anke Feuchtenberger / Ulli Lust (Hannover, 21.2.–14.6.2026)
Posted: July 12, 2026 Filed under: review | Tags: Anke Feuchtenberger, comics, exhibition, feminism, German, Hannover, museums, Ulli Lust, Wilhelm Busch Museum Leave a commentLuckily I caught the double exhibition “Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst” at Museum Wilhelm Busch shortly before it closed. Or is it two separate, concurrent exhibitions with the same title? Anyway, the pairing of two German-language, feminist comic creators of roughly the same age makes sense, even though their artistic approaches – surreal vs. reality-based – are very different.
Anke Feuchtenberger’s (*1963 in East Berlin) section started not with comics but posters that she had designed in the early and mid-1990s, mostly for local theatre productions in Berlin. Her second, larger room was all about her comics – Die Hure H (written by Katrin de Vries, about whom we didn’t learn much in this exhibition), of course, as well as some other works such as Genossin Kuckuck, were represented through original drawings in charcoal, pencil and other media.
Copies of the corresponding published books were also there for the visitor to peruse. Many of Feuchtenberger’s stories had been first published in magazines and later collected in books, and it was fascinating to see how much some of them had been reworked from version to version, particularly the caption texts.
This is also true for Ulli Lust’s (*1967 in Vienna) comics: in her section, some of the original artworks were preliminary versions that differed from the published final version. In this page from her latest comic, Die Frau als Mensch. Schamaninnen (2026), for instance, we can see how the speech bubble text was replaced with that of a caption at the bottom of the page, which was slightly re-worded, and a caption was added in the top right corner.
Apart from the two volumes of Die Frau als Mensch, the exhibition focused on works such as Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein (2017), Fashionvictims (collected in 2008), and, of course, her breakthrough comic Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (2009). For some reason, Lust’s Flughunde (2013) was not part of her exhibition – perhaps because it adapts Marcel Beyer’s eponymous novel and is thus not originally written by herself, or because it didn’t fit the feminist theme of the exhibition. Neither did we get to see any of her earliest works; I don’t think the exhibition even mentioned her being one of the founding members of legendary comics collective, Monogatari, in 1999.
Still, while the two exhibitions were far from exhaustive, they offered much to see and learn and invited us to re-discover Feuchtenberger’s and Lust’s rich oeuvre. Sadly, no exhibition catalogue seems to have been published.
Rating: ● ● ● ● ○
In addition to those two exhibitions, a smaller one with comics by Katharina Greve (Prinzessin Petronia and Mutter und Tochter) was integrated into the permanent exhibition on the first floor of the museum, and is still open until August 2.
Politics in Warren Ellis’s Fell
Posted: May 1, 2026 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Fell, Image, Labour Day, law, police, politics, US, Warren Ellis Leave a commentFell (art by Ben Templesmith) was first published in individual comic book issues between 2005 and 2008, the first 8 of which have been collected into Fell vol. 1: Feral City (although by now it has become very unlikely that there will ever be a vol. 2). While the issues are largely self-contained, the overarching story is that police detective Richard Fell has just been transferred to Snowtown, a fictional American city in which crime is rampant. The local police department is understaffed, underfunded, disillusioned and has practically given up on fighting crime, but Fell is determined to set things right.
Any cop story is, of course, inherently political. As part of the executive branch, police officers enforce the laws issued by the legislative branch. For the populace, they thus represent the government in a two-fold way: protecting law-abiding citizens, and prosecuting those who defy the law. In Fell, Ellis portrays the police as he does in many other comics, i.e. as incapable of fighting crime (due to being overworked, lazy, or incompetent) and thus as a symptom of a failed democratic government.
But there is also another side of the police that Ellis shows us here, personified by Richard Fell and his unrelenting eagerness to solve crimes, his sense of justice and his unwillingness to give up on seemingly hopeless cases. Fell is clearly presented as not only the protagonist but the hero of this story, “a good man” in the words of his girlfriend Mayko. He is a character that readers can easily side with, possibly even identify with.
That aspect is problematic, however, as Fell is not a goody-two-shoes either. He doesn’t always do things by the book but rather employs unconventional methods – means that are justified by the end. For instance, he breaks into a suspect’s house without a search warrant, unnecessarily insults or beats up suspects or shoots them in the leg when arresting them, or pins a murder on a robber by tampering with evidence and instigating the robbery victim to give false testimony. Each time, though, Fell’s violence is inflicted on a criminal, i.e., not an ‘innocent’ victim of police brutality but someone who ‘deserves’ it. Fell’s methods are presented as the only way to solve the case and establish justice; following the proper procedures would lead to failure (and perhaps not make for an exciting story). In this way, Fell is not so much different from the vigilantes of Ellis’s (and other writers’) superhero comics, which makes Fell another example of a comic in which Ellis questions the effectiveness and perhaps even the entire concept of law enforcement in a democratic system.
Another, more subtle but maybe more disturbing political aspect of Fell can be identified in the portrayal of the criminals. If Fell is established as a morally upright and ‘good’ character, then the criminals he is fighting must be wrong and evil. But the criminals all have something else in common: poverty. Snowtown’s high crime rate is inextricably linked to its poverty. It is described as a place that is – literally and figuratively – “fallen apart”; there is no fresh food in the supermarket, and in one part of town “they’re having to use a well for water”. Packs of wild dogs roam the streets, attacking people. Poverty and crime form a vicious circle, poverty making people commit crimes (though most of Fell’s antagonists are simply psychopaths) and crime contributing to the near-collapse of the city’s infrastructure. Often the crime victims aren’t entirely innocent either, or at least morally compromised: a murdered husband used to beat his daughter, an elderly woman illegally deals in firearms, another woman used to be a crack addict and threatened to assault her ex-husband (the actual antagonist), a murdered woman used to smoke cigarettes despite being pregnant (not a crime, of course, but not model citizen behaviour either), etc. The disturbing thing is the ease with which Ellis links poverty, crime and moral corruption together that makes them logically, inevitably follow from one another, thus putting an entire social stratum under general suspicion. In Snowtown, there seems to be neither an honest beggar nor a wealthy criminal.
The only exception to this rule, i.e. the only villainous figure who is portrayed as well-off, is perhaps Paul Carducci in issue #7, a murder suspect’s defence lawyer who hints at being paid by a “benefector” of his client, and who ultimately succeeds in reducing the charge from murder to burglary on the basis of what amounts to a technicality, or a legal loophole (“involuntary intoxication” – the murder turns out to have been committed under the influence of a drug that the suspect had inhaled accidentally). Fell is furious about this, as for him the suspect is clearly guilty of murder and should be punished accordingly. The sense of injustice is heightened by the brutality of the murder, and the self-satisfied smirks of client and lawyer as they are walking away. It is the only story in this trade paperback in which Fell does not get his way. The reason for his failure is also made clear: he had not only researched the drug but also told Carducci about it – he “had to be so diligent, so exact, so totally goddamn controlling about the whole thing.” In other words, the solution that would have led to ‘real justice’ would have been either to be less diligent and exact, or to hide his knowledge from Carducci or even lie to him. Thus this little episode can be interpreted as not only a critique of the police but also a critique of the legal system.
Finally, there is one recurring detail in Fell that might count as a political reference, albeit of quite a different kind: a mysterious minor character, a nun or at least a person wearing a nun’s habit, whose face is covered by a Richard Nixon mask. Ellis never explains what the deal with this character is, whose behaviour becomes more and more shady with each appearance. Then again, Nixon masks have become so ubiquitous in real life as to almost lose any political meaning whatsoever.
For another political reading of Fell, see Roy Boyd’s review at Slings & Arrows.
Mieke Bal’s ‘De-disciplining the Eye’ – in comics?
Posted: March 31, 2026 Filed under: review | Tags: art history, comics, Garon Tsuchiya, manga, Mieke Bal, narratology, Nobuaki Minegishi, Old Boy, theory, Women's History Month 1 CommentMieke Bal (*1946) started out as a Literary Theorist and later turned to Art History, a combination of discplines that might be of interest from a comics perspective. Specifically, she applied literary narratological concepts to visual artworks, e.g. in her 1990 article “De-disciplining the Eye” (Critical Inquiry 16, 506–531). In this essay, Bal discusses two contrasting modes in which elements (signs, details) in an image can be interpreted: either as something that contributes to the narrative of the work as a “meaningful, well-structured whole”, or as something that “fill[s] up the surface of the work in such a way that the representation passes for realistic” but is “meaningless” with regard to the story that the image tells. These are not properties inherent to those elements, but rather ways of “reading” the work – Bal calls them “textual reading” and “realistic reading”, and the choice of employing one or the other is always up to the viewer.
Bal’s example is Rembrandt’s painting, Bathshebah’s Bath, in the Louvre from 1654. Two details in this painting, the letter in Bathsheba’s hand and the “undeniably melancholic” look on her face, are puzzling: traditionally, Bathsheba taking a bath occurs at the very beginning of the biblical story in which King David sees her naked as she is bathing, which makes him want to take possession of her even though she is married to someone else. The letter, though not mentioned in the source text, can be interpreted as either David summoning Bathsheba to him, or David ordering her husband’s death, both of which would explain Bathsheba’s sadness. However, both events involving the letter happen after Batsheba’s bath (and, in the latter case, the letter containing her husband’s death sentence is never seen by her). Thus the letter and Bathsheba’s gaze could be called proleptic devices, as they refer to a future point in the narrative.
The realistic mode of reading, however, has become a cultural habit – the ‘natural’ way in which we look at things. Breaking this habit requires the titular ‘de-disciplining [of] the eye’, which enables us to freely choose between the two modes. Of course, we cannot expect to find a detail as “out of place” as Bathsheba’s letter and melancholic gaze in every work of art. But, in principle, a certain degree of ambiguity, of freedom of interpreting details, should always be present. Perhaps even in comics?
Having read another manga written by Garon Tsuchiya the other day made me want to re-read his Old Boy (art by Nobuaki Minegishi). Most of its pages are divided into many small panels which often show an object or a glimpse of a figure as part of a slightly longer action. For instance, in vol. 1, five panels are used to show that the protagonist is smoking in bed (p. 228) – one panel in which he takes a cigarette out of a pack, one in which he lights a lighter, one in which we see the silhouette of his face with lit cigarette in mouth and lighter below it, one close-up panel in which we see his face as he is smoking the cigarette and staring intently, and finally one wide panel in which we see him smoking in bed next to his girlfriend in a hotel room.
To simply convey the action of him smoking a cigarette, the first four panels would not have been necessary. They depict details that are not significant. However, they still have a purpose. Each can be interpreted as part of the action, thus of the plot, and the manga as a coherent (narrative) ‘text’. Another example would be p. 415 in which the protagonist wakes up at night from a ringing telephone and picks up the receiver – the entire page, no less than ten panels, are used to depict that.
More interesting in our context are details whose narrative purpose is less clear. For instance, there is the potted plant in the protagonist’s girlfriend’s room. It is first shown in several panels on pp. 65-66. After being imprisoned for ten years, it is the first real flower the protagonist sees, so he regards it fondly. the plant returns in a panel on p. 103 where its relevance to the action is minor, but still there: through a gap between the drawn curtains, a ray of sunlight falls on the table on which the flowerpot stands, which establishes the time and place at which the following scene takes place; it is the next day after the protagonist has spent the night at his new girlfriend’s, and they are still sleeping even though the sun has been up for some time (it’s four in the afternoon, as the alarm clock on the next page tells us). The third appearance of the flowerpot is the relevant one here, though. On p. 161, we see it between other panels in which the protagonist and his girlfriend are talking to each other in bed.
The time (night) and place (her apartment) have already been established two pages prior, so that cannot be the purpose of this panel. Neither does it show the protagonist’s point of view (or his girlfriend’s), as he is constantly looking upwards to the ceiling, whereas the table with the plant would be diagonally sideways and in the direction of the head end of the bed (as we see on p. 165). The only reason why the mangaka chose to show the flowerpot again seems to have been the wish to disrupt the long and somewhat monotonous sequence of ‘talking heads’ in this scene. Out of the 17 panels on this double page, 14 show either the protagonist or his girlfriend or both; the other three depict objects around them: cigarettes, a radiator, and the potted plant. Thus this panel lends itself to an interpretation as an element that “fills up” the page, that contributes to its “density”, instead of adding to the manga’s narrative. That being said, as Bal’s essay reminds us, both ‘realistic reading’ and ‘textual reading’ are always available for each work and both are equally valid modes of reading.
Index to all “[theory] – in comics?” posts on this weblog
Review, Jirō Taniguchi memorial edition: Blue Fighter
Posted: February 10, 2026 Filed under: review | Tags: Ao no senshi, comics, Garon Tsuchiya, Jirō Taniguchi, manga, sports 1 CommentFrom some of Jirō Taniguchi’s († February 11, 2017) last manga, we go all the way back to one of his earliest.
Blue Fighter (青の戦士 Ao no senshi, known as “Blue Corner” in some countries)
Language: German (originally Japanese)
Authors: Caribu Marley (writer), Jirō Taniguchi (artist)
Publisher: Schreiber & Leser (originally Futabasha)
Year: 2020 (original run 1980–1981)
Pages: 300
Price: € 17
Website: https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/knt4gnp/ao-no-senshi
ISBN: 978-3-96582-020-3
Japanese lightweight boxer Reggae (spelled with the kanji characters 礼 rei and 桂 kei) is only moderately successful, losing more fights than he wins – but always by knockout, never by points, and regularly drunk while fighting. The fans love him for his recklessness and unpredictability. One day he gets scouted by an American boxing manager who senses the opportunity to make lots of money from him, but Reggae’s path to international stardom takes him through the dark underbellies of the boxing business.
Blue Fighter is written by Caribu Marley (sometimes also spelled “Karibu”, “Carib”, “Marei”, or “Mārei”) who later, under the name Garon Tsuchiya, penned Old Boy (1996–1998, art by Nobuaki Minegishi). It is no coincidence, of course, that a writer who calls himself “Marley” would name his protagonist “Reggae”, have him wear a boxing robe with Bob Marley’s image on the back, and quote the lyrics of “No Woman No Cry” (plus another quote at the very end attributed to Bob Marley that I haven’t been able to verify – possibly a variation of the line “How long shall they kill our prophets” from “Redemption Song”). That is where the reggae references end though; within the story, blues and jazz are the only types of music that play any role.
And that is just one of Blue Fighter‘s many inconsistencies. The story is all over the place. Far from being a slice-of-life sports manga, Blue Fighter has more in common with a 1980s action film. It is a visual testosterone cocktail, a kaleidoscope of manliness – or rather, a notion of manliness so puerile that it’s hard to believe both writer and artist were in their 30s when making this manga. Apart from boxing fights, this manga features motorcycles, alcohol (usually whisky), a back-alley brawl, sex with a prostitute, bare-knuckle fighting, a nude ‘nymphomaniac’ woman, a man shot down with a handgun, a car crash, bullfighting, bear hunting, and suitcases full of cash.
What about Taniguchi’s art though? Like many other seinen mangaka, Taniguchi struggles to differentiate Japanese from white Western characters, and especially in the beginning, the characters’ proportions seem a bit off, their heads slightly too big for their bodies. But the artwork excels when it matters, and that is the boxing fights. Sadly there are only four or five of them in the entire manga and they are quite short, but the action is depicted so clearly and at the same time so dynamically and aesthetically that one wishes this were an actual boxing manga, and not just a – rather crude – action manga in which the protagonist happens to be a boxer.
Recommended for anyone who wants to see how humble the beginnings of a future master mangaka were.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Exhibition review: I, Animal. From the Big Bad Wolf to Donald Duck – Animals in Comics (Kassel, 23.8.2025–12.4.2026)
Posted: January 10, 2026 Filed under: review | Tags: animals, comics, exhibition, German, Kassel, museums Leave a comment
Grimmwelt, a museum dedicated to the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, Germany, is hosting a special exhibition on animals in comics. The chronologically organised exhibition starts with 19th-century Bilderbogen, German illustrated broadsheets that can be regarded as proto-comics. Then we move on to comics proper, and as this is a show curated by Alexander Braun, we are of course treated to various original printed pages and even drawings from American newspaper strips, e.g. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or Krazy Kat.
Later comics and characters on display, in addition to the aforementioned Disney characters, include Pogo, Garfield, and for some reason Marvel’s Wolverine. Towards the end of the exhibition there is also a section on German comics, such as those by Ralf König: Roy & Al, in which the protagonists are dogs, is an obvious choice, but more interesting is the inclusion of Stehaufmännchen in which König explores the origin of humans and asks what makes us different from other animals. Another artist featured in the German section, though far less well known, is Josephine Mark with her recent comic, Trip mit Tropf (2022).
Naturally, a vast topic like ‘animals in comics’ is impossible to cover exhaustively in a medium-sized exhibition like this. However, pretty much entirely missing are more realistic depictions of animals in comics, e.g. in We3 or Pride of Baghdad where they are only slightly anthropomorphised. (I might be biased, of course, having written a journal article about those.) One could also think of Masashi Tanaka’s Gon, and then realise that hardly any manga are featured in this exhibition at all, except for Paru Itagaki’s Beastars. Another omission: comics in which animals are not necessarily protagonists but still play a major role and are simply depicted as animals, not anthropomorphised at all, e.g. in Jirō Taniguchi’s Inu o kau.
Nevertheless, if one visits this exhibition with an open mind, there are quite a few interesting things to see. After Kassel, the show will travel on to Dortmund. There is also an extensive catalogue available from Panini (in German).
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The best comics of 2025: a meta list
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: review | Tags: 2025, best-of lists, comics, ranking, year-end review Leave a comment
As always at this time of the year, I aggregated ‘best of the year’ lists on the Internet by assigning each comic on them a score between 1 and 30 according to its rank or total number of comics on that list (full explanation here). Adding the scores together yields the following list.
THE TOP 25 COMICS OF 2025:
- Cannon by Lee Lai (110 points)
- Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki, tied with
Drome by Jesse Lonergan (109) - –
- Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (108)
- Black Arms to Hold You Up by Ben Passmore (96)
- Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman (94)
- Tongues by Anders Nilsen (93)
- This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux (92)
- Spent by Alison Bechdel (76)
- The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco (69)
- The Ultimates by Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri (63)
- Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson (60)
- Batman: Dark Patterns by Dan Watters and Hayden Sherman, tied with
Precious Rubbish by Kayla E. (57) - –
- The Weight by Melissa Mendes (56)
- Muybridge by Guy Delisle (50)
- Talking to My Father’s Ghost by Alex Krokus (47)
- Absolute Martian Manhunter by Deniz Camp and Javier Rodríguez, tied with
Bowling with Corpses by Mike Mignola,
Kamui den (a.k.a. The Legend of Kamui) by Sanpei Shirato, and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Jason Aaron and Juan Ferreyra (45) - –
- –
- –
- Flip by Ngozi Ukazu, tied with
More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey (42) - –
- Schweigen by Birgit Weyhe (39)
- Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, tied with
Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh (38)
Once more I couldn’t find as many lists as up until some years ago, so the aggregated ranking is not very reliable and there are many ties. Anyway, what we can definitely see is that it was a successful year for Deniz Camp who has written no fewer than three comics in the top 25. Although (relative) newcomers Camp, Lee Lai, and Jesse Lonergan take the top spots, we find many industry ‘veterans’ on the list like Alison Bechdel, Guy Delisle, Joe Sacco etc.
Apart from the venerable Kamui den (originally published in the 1960s), two other noteworthy manga that almost made the top 25 are Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano and Veil Volume 1: Temperature of Orange by Kotteri – both unusual manga though, as they are fully coloured.
The next-highest ranked European comics after the German-language Schweigen would be the French-language Deux filles nues by Luz and Revoir Comanche by Romain Renard.
The following lists were evaluated: AIPT (part 1, part 2), A.V. Club, The Beat (best kids comics), Book Riot, CBC, ComFor (German), ComicBookClub, ComicBook.com, comic.de (German), Comickunst (German) Comic Frontier, Forbes, Gosh (adult, kids & young adult), The Guardian, IGN, K-Comics Beat, Kono manga ga sugoi via ANN, Library Journal, The New York Times, NPR, NYPL (strip collections, comics and graphic novels), Oricon via Screen Rant, Publishers Weekly (comics, manga), School Library Journal (graphic novels, manga), SKTCHD, YALSA.
Wikipedia Asian Month 2025 – ‘Participating is everything’
Posted: December 14, 2025 Filed under: review | Tags: animation, anime, Asia, Entotsu-machi no Poupelle, Japan, Japanese culture, Wikipedia, Yusuke Hirota Leave a commentNovember is Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM), and this year another one has gone by without me having managed to create the minimum number of articles – four – required for receiving a reward in the form of a postcard. But I did participate! WAM is about writing as many articles (of a certain minimum length and quality) on Asian subjects within a month as you can, and if that happens to be only one, then so be it. There are even Wikipedians who enter WAM ‘out of competition’ by expanding existing articles (stubs) instead of creating new ones – a valuable contribution to Wikipedia, even though it doesn’t earn them any points or rewards.
The subject of my sole WAM article this year was Yusuke Hirota, director of the 2020 anime film, Poupelle of Chimney Town (えんとつ町のプペル Entotsu-machi no Poupelle). I had the opportunity to see Poupelle at a film festival in 2023, and I was surprised to learn that although there was a Wikipedia entry on the anime itself, there wasn’t any information about its director on Wikipedia except his name.
Having little doubt about Hirota’s notability, I decided to create his Wikipedia article. Notability is an important concept for Wikipedia, as it is not sensible to have an article about every person on earth. While Hirota has only directed one film so far, he has long been active in the anime industry in other capacities and plays an active role in the introduction and establishment of CGI in anime, Poupelle being a feature-length film that is entirely rendered in CGI but retains somewhat of a classic hand-drawn, 2D anime look. Now that Hirota has also directed a sequel to Poupelle which is soon to be released, having his own Wikipedia article seems more justified than ever.
It might not be the greatest Wikipedia article ever written, being put together from a small number of Japanese interviews, press releases and news items on the Internet. But perhaps Wikipedia is now a tiny bit better than it was without it.
Will I manage to create four articles in November 2026? I’ll definitely try.
Manga review, Halloween 2025 edition: Hideshi Hino Masterworks
Posted: October 31, 2025 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Halloween, Hideshi Hino, horror, Jigokuhen, manga Leave a commentHorror manga can be quite cruel, cynical, even downright nihilistic. Hideshi Hino’s manga are all that too, but there is also a surprisingly great deal of warmth and humanity in them.
Hideshi Hino Masterworks (original title: 日野日出志ベストワークス Hino Hideshi Best Works)
Language: German (originally Japanese)
Publisher: Egmont (originally Ōta Shuppan)
Year: 2025 (this collection originally published 2023, individual manga first published 1970–1982)
Pages: ~360
Price: € 24
Website: https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/sr74pqc/hino-hideshi-besuto-wakusu
ISBN: 978-3-7555-0474-0
Essentially, this compilation could be called “Panorama of Hell and other stories”, as that manga alone takes up more than half of the volume. It contains the following six stories (listed here in rough chronological order of first publication):
Zoroku’s Strange Disease (Zōroku no kibyō, 1970, 39 pages)
This is one of Hino’s best-known stories, but its setting is different from most of his others in that it takes place in a remote village in an unspecified past. Farmer Zoroku, who is described as “slow on the uptake”, suffers from boils on his face. Gradually his disease gets more severe until his whole body transforms into a monstrous, amorphous mass leaking blood and pus. By then, he has already been banished to the woods by the other villagers. The way Zoroku is treated by the village community is perhaps the true horror here.
Hino once said that because he started out drawing children’s manga, he inadvertently developed a cartoonish drawing style with big-nosed, almost cute characters, and that is very much visible in this story. Especially the chubby crows are adorable.
The Fish Tank [German: Das Aquarium; not sure what the official English or Japanese title is] (1970, 55 pages)
This story bears some similarities to Zoroku, but is set in a modern-day apartment block. The unnamed boy protagonist is also an outcast who has been left limbless and disfigured by a traffic accident. His widowed mother lovingly cares for him, until she takes on a new job, presumably as a hostess, and becomes cold and even abusive towards the boy. His only source of joy is his fish tank; the species of tropical fish therein are portrayed in panels that stand outside the narrative but allow for associations to be made between the characteristics of the fish and the characters and events in the story. The ending is quite surreal and I won’t spoil it, but this manga is once again not so much horrific but rather sad.
A Lullaby from Hell (Jigoku no komori-uta, 1970 [this is the original publication date given in this collection, but on the Internet I have also seen 1971 and 1977], 33 pages)
A blueprint of sorts for Panorama of Hell, this story comes in the guise of an autobiography. The narrator, a mangaka named Hideshi Hino who lives in a derelict house in an industrial wasteland, tells about his childhood in which he, too, suffered his “crazy” mother’s abuse, and developed a fondness for grotesque things and activities such as killing animals and preserving their bodies in jars. One day he discovers a supernatural ability: he can bring about the death of anyone simply by wishing for it and imagining it in grisly detail.
The Snake Shop Mystery (1972, 12 pages)
This is the only erotic horror story in this collection, although according to the afterword, Hino actually made quite a few such manga. This time, the narrative perspective is that of an elderly bedridden woman who has to witness her husband’s affair with her widowed daughter-in-law. From beyond the grave, the deceased husband punishes his widow’s infidelity by ending her life in a cruel and imaginative way.
The Spotted Egg (Madara no tamago, 1975, 23 pages)
Once more the setting is a house in a polluted industrial area, and once more the protagonist is a schoolboy who lives alienated from his parents: his alcoholic father and his reclusive, (presumably mentally) ill mother. One day he finds a strange large egg in the sewer canal and takes it home. Eventually, while the boy is at school, something hatches from the egg and escapes. Then animals and small children in the neighbourhood go missing. In the end, the creature comes back for the boy and his family – but Hino, being an accomplished storyteller, never shows the monster. Instead, we get to see all sorts of other horrific details throughout the story, from the rotting carcass of a dog floating in the canal where the boy plays, to the insane grandfather who tortures dolls in his room.
Panorama of Hell (Jigokuhen, 1982, 191 pages)
Hino’s magnum opus is a succession of interconnected short stories, narrated by a “painter” who looks very much like Hideshi Hino in A Lullaby from Hell (and as we will see, this manga is indeed quite autobiographical). However, in one of the stories, the mangaka Hideshi Hino is referred to as a distinct person, so let’s stick to calling the narrator an unnamed artist. In the first couple of episodes, he shows us the surroundings of his home: there’s a guillotine with which countless people are beheaded every night, a crematory where their bodies are burnt, a graveyard where the executed are buried (apparently, some of those decapitated by the guillotine are cremated and some interred?), etc. These first few chapters are completely over the top, surreal imaginations. The same is true for the next few chapters which portray the painter’s family, starting with his children and wife who engage in all sorts of horrific activities. E.g. his wife works as a bartender at the “Hell Inn” where she attends on the headless corpses who rise from their graves every night.
Then Panorama of Hell becomes more interesting as the life stories of the painter’s grandfather, parents, and brother are told. These chapters are much more toned down, rely less on supernatural elements, and are grounded in Hino’s biography and in real-life history. For instance, we see his family flee from his native Manchuria to Japan, his father serve in WWII, etc. The theme of parental abuse returns, with both the painter’s father and mother physically assaulting and torturing their sons as well as each other. The most touching story is that of the painter’s brother who as a child defends the painter and takes their parents’ beatings in his place, later becomes a violent thug himself, and as a result of his lifestyle ends up so badly beaten up that he is paralysed and mutilated beyond recognition. The final two chapters become very surreal again, and they also contain a nice twist that I won’t give away here.
Scariest moment in this volume: there are a few splash panels in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall that are probably intended as jump scares, but they don’t have that much of a shocking effect. More disturbing is e.g. the recurring motif of a parent ripping his or her son’s hair out, which first occurs in A Lullaby from Hell.
So what to make of this volume? On the one hand, Hino’s is an undeniably unique voice in horror manga and his creations deserve their place in the history of that genre. On the other hand, it’s not a book that one likes to pick up; it’s a reading experience that is more revolting than enjoyable. These manga are easy to admire but hard to relish.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
Find the previous Halloween blogposts here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
Exhibition review: Supersankarit, Tampere, 29.5.2025–18.1.2026
Posted: September 4, 2025 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, DC, exhibition, Finnish, Italian, Marvel, museums, superheroes, Tampere, US Leave a comment
Created in Italy and first shown at Comic-Con Museum San Diego as “The Myth of Superheroes”, the exhibition “Supersankarit – Antiikista nykypäivään” (Superheroes from Antiquity to Today) is now shown at the multi-exhibition space, Vapriikki in Tampere, Finland. Its premise is – perhaps simplistically – that modern-day superheroes are direct transmutations of ancient gods and heroes (Greek and otherwise); Superman is Heracles, Aquaman is Poseidon, The Flash is Hermes, etc. For this reason, some ancient busts of those mythological figures from Italian museums, apparently not only copies but also some originals, are on display. The main focus of the exhibition, however, are the characters from Marvel and DC.
The exhibited materials are varied: comic book covers (some original, some facsimiles), original comic artwork, film posters, action figures, and other merchandise, including even a playable arcade cabinet of X-Men: Children of the Atom from 1994. However, as is often the case with such exhibitions, many of the items are only proxies for something else – the film posters represent the films, the comic book covers represent the stories in those comic books, etc. This, in turn, means that not much information is provided on the item itself.
An exhibition on American superheroes that is shown in Finland but originated in Italy makes for a weird cultural hybrid. On the one hand, some of the exhibited American comic book covers are from Italian editions (“Il mitico Thor” etc.), and there are several original artworks that Italian artist Simone Bianchi created for Marvel and DC. On the other hand, there is a section on comic adaptations of the Finnish Kalevala epic, and on Finnish artist Kari Leppänen who illustrated the Swedish edition of The Phantom.
If there is one thing that Supersankarit demonstrates, it’s that the topic of superheroes is an incredibly broad one. Too broad, perhaps, for such a medium-sized exhibition – it lacks focus, and none of its sub-topics are really explored in depth. One could make a separate exhibition out of each: superheroes and mythology, superhero film adaptations, superhero action figures… Still, there are a few new bits and pieces of information to be learned in this show even for a comics scholar, and it is always interesting to see how certain things are presented to a general audience. For instance, I was surprised to see a relatively obscure comic such as Mike Grell’s The Longbow Hunters from 1987 to be included in a slideshow of the most important superhero comics of each decade, side by side with the likes of Elektra: Assassin and Wolfman/Pérez’s Teen Titans.
Rating: ● ● ○ ○ ○
Review, Jirō Taniguchi memorial edition: Enticing Things / Restless Spirits and Silent Companions
Posted: August 14, 2025 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Izanaumono, Jirō Taniguchi, manga 1 CommentJirō Taniguchi would have turned 78 today. In 2017, a posthumous collection of his short stories was published, featuring some of his final works.
Izanaumono (いざなうもの, “Enticing Things”; German title: Unruhige Geister und stille Gefährten [“Restless Spirits and Silent Companions”])
Language: German (originally Japanese)
Authors: Jirō Taniguchi (writer / artist), Lafcadio Hearn (original author), Hyakken Uchida (original author)
Publisher: Carlsen (originally Shōgakukan)
Year: 2019 (Japanese collection 2017; originally published 2006–2017)
Pages: 190
Price: € 22
Website: https://www.mangaupdates.com/series/d5h9jue/izanaumono
ISBN: 978-3-551-77880-2
The volume contains the following short manga, listed here in chronological order of original appearance (plus 10 pages of sketches, a text-only essay by Taniguchi, and some introductory notes):
The Magic Mountain (Mahō no yama, 2006, 63 pages)
In some markets, this story appears to have been released as a standalone publication, but it was originally serialised in two chapters in Young Jump. In the beginning, it’s a classic Taniguchi manga: the protagonist is Ken’ichi, a schoolboy in 1960s rural Japan who lives with his little sister at his grandparents’, his father having died long ago and his mother terminally ill at a hospital in faraway Osaka. Then the story becomes Ghibli-esque: he meets a talking salamander who turns out to be a guardian spirit of the mountain… It’s all very reminiscent of The Millennium Forest, Taniguchi’s final, unfinished long-form manga. Told from the perspective of adult Ken’ichi who has now lost the ability to talk to animals, a sense of nostalgia – familiar to Taniguchi readers – permeates The Magic Mountain.
From Beyond (Kanatayori, 2014, 15 pages)
According to the editorial notes, From Beyond first appeared in France in 2012 and was slightly revised for the Japanese market. In this very short story, a time-travelling boy from the future is shipwrecked in present-day Japan. He gets adopted by a Japanese family and at the end uses his superpowers to save the day. While the science-fiction elements and the protagonist bear similarities to Icaro, the art style is unlike most of Taniguchi’s other manga and is mainly based on ink wash painting.
In an Unknown Place: In the Tea Cup / The Syrup Buyer (Doko ni ka, 2016, 55 pages)
If Furari is ‘The Walking Man in Edo’, then In an Unknown Place is ‘The Walking Man in Meiji-era Tokyo’. Only partially based on Lafcadio Hearn’s stories, the frame narrative of Hearn aimlessly wandering around in the city takes up even more pages than those stories themselves. Which, frankly, are not that interesting anyway. Those two Japanese ghost stories can be read e.g. at Project Gutenberg (in the collections Kottō and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, respectively) – one is only a fragment that ends abruptly, the other ridiculously short (230 words). The intricate way in which Taniguchi interweaves the two narrative layers is not without appeal, but one wonders if this manga wouldn’t have been stronger without the inclusion of the two Hearn stories.
The Companion: Fireworks (Izanaumono hanabi, previously unpublished, 30 pages)
Another adaptation, this time of a story by Hyakken Uchida, a 20th-century writer. Surreal and dreamlike, the plot goes nowhere, but the art is an exceptional treat, a blend of pencil and ink wash. Sea waves are depicted in a stylised, almost ornamental way. Taniguchi worked on this manga at the same time as The Millennium Forest and finished neither; the final 10 pages are only sketched in pencil, but it is certainly fascinating to see Taniguchi’s working process in reverse, as it were.
Overall, this collection is perhaps more of a collector’s item for Taniguchi completists. The Magic Mountain, while not his most innovative manga, is a charming little story that can be regarded as ‘Taniguchi in a nutshell’.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 