Manga: Reviews of Various Horror Manga - a podcast by Stergios Botzakis & Derek Royal

Time Codes:

• 00:00:58 - Introduction
• 00:03:22 - Set up of episode
• 00:07:25 - Hell Baby
• 00:33:27 - Fragments of Horror
• 01:08:53 - Lychee Light Club
• 01:31:52 - Portus
• 01:48:16 - Black Museum: The Ghost and the Lady, Book 1
• 02:07:46 - Neo Parasyte F
• 02:25:55 - Wrap up
• 02:27:23 - Contact us

In celebration of the Halloween season, Shea and Derek devote October's episode to a discussion of horror manga. This month they look at six -- count them, six! -- books, all of which embody the eerie holiday spirit in some way. That makes this a extra-long episode, clocking in at over two and a half hours, the longest manga show the Two Guys have ever produced. They begin with a classic example of horror manga, Hideshi Hino's Hell Baby (Blast Books), and then move on to the medium's most notable practitioner of the genre, Junji Ito and his 2014 collection Fragments of Horror (VIZ Media). They then turn up the creep factor with Usamaru Furuya's Lychee Light Club (Vertical Comics) and Jun Abe's Portus (VIZ Media). Finally, the guys conclude with two brand new titles from Kodansha Comics, Kazuhiro Fujita's The Black Museum: The Ghost and the Lady, Book 1 and the shojo anthology Neo Parasyte F. The latter is a fifteen-story celebration of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s classic Parasyte series, which ran from 1988 to 1995. In their extensive discussions, Shea and Derek visit such topics as the juxtaposition of cute and gross, why the grotesque may become a writing crutch, the many uses of gender ambiguity, if video games are inherently spooky, and how Florence Nightingale can be quite sexy. That's right, folks, it's all here!

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