Monday, 25 June 2012

Manga Monday!

It's Monday, and I've spent a significant portion of my paycheque on buying Manga.  Damn you, Dave's, for being so accommodating to browsers!  (For those of you not from neck of the woods I currently inhabit - Dave's is my magnificent local comic book shop, and the first place to benefit from my hard-earned after the 23rd of the month.)

There's a lot of damned  good horror Manga out there, and for a couple of months I've had my eye on a series called Parasyte.  It had me at "You...are...food..."     







It's a proper gorefest - within the first few pages you have a guy whose head splits clean open to reveal an unholy cross between The Thing, the Predator and one of those messed-up things from Pan's Labrinth, which proceeds to bite his wife's head off and eat it.

However, despite the gore and high body-count of this series so far, it also manages to be a strangely touching story.  The protagonist is a high-school student called Shin, who was infected by an alien parasite but managed to prevent it from invading past his arm.  In consequence, he has a sentient alien being in place of his right hand, who takes the name of Migi.


Just a normal guy, and his alien-parasite hand











Once Shin realises that he's stuck with Migi, a strangely touching relationship unfolds.  Migi (translation of Japanese for "right") knows instantly that he's failed to occupy the brain  - the goal of the invading species.   Being a parasite, he relies on Shin for his food, and Shin begins to rely on Migi to defend him...


So sweet... just like that thing from Flight of the Navigator. (Apart from the hand-eating...)
   




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