365 Days of Manga, Day 112: Goths Cage

GOTHS CAGE (Phantom) • DrMaster (2008) • Yasushi Suzuki • 1 volume • Gothic Fantasy • 16+ (violence)
This overpriced 32-page collection of dark fairytales demonstrates both Yasushi Suzuki’s sumptuous color artwork and his inability to tell a story. In “Glass Cage” a slave girl trades her soul to become a beautiful glass princess. “The Feeling of Pain” involves an imprisoned thief. In “The Pair,” the longest story and the only one with anything like an ending, a mad barber collects women’s severed bodyparts to resurrect his dead wife. The suffering-focused stories–vignettes, really–look pretty but make no sense, and they would be better with no text at all rather than the existing obfuscatory narration. At least his color art is clearer than the blurry black and white in Purgatory Kabuki.

Today’s winner is Michael J. of Massachusetts. Congratulations, Michael!
Do you like horror? For those of you who like your horror squamous, rugose and tentacley, full of blasphemous, unnameable terrors, I’ve just written a new article for io9.com on the intersection between manga, anime and H.P. Lovecraft, arguably the 20th century’s most influential horror writer. So if you’re 18 and up (really, it’s not that nudity-filled, but I am obliged to say that), check out The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga!