What The Cluck?

 

It has been a dry season at my local library (but isn’t it always?).  A while aback, I saw Volume 1 of Shu Sakuratani’s Rooster Fighter on the shelves…and immediately dismissed it as more goofy, isekai random Japanese nonsense.  You know, like Reincarnated As The Dungeon’s Only Vending Machine or So I’m A Spider, So What?

                                      

But an exceptionally dry spell without any really new manga on the shelves and a boring couple of weeks had left me desperate for something new to review.  Really needed to stretch those creative muscles.

 

And, surprisingly, this manga did NOT suck.

 

The back of the manga espoused it as “one ordinary but heroic rooster is mankind’s only defense against giant monsters-beware his cock-a-doodle-doo!”.

 

I did not make that up: The aforementioned cock-a-doodle-doo is actually his finishing move, a crow that resonates with the bodies of his opponents and makes them explode.

 

Granted, it is just as comedic as the premise and the blurb make it sound, but it’s more than that.  The rooster, Keiji, is pretty much every Gritty 90’s Anti-Hero trope rolled into a tiny, feathered package.  He is, for lack of a better term, a man’s man who claims to not like kids, hates to see women cry, and beds a different one in pretty much every town.  The characters he encounters have deep, emotional backstories.  And he is even on a quest for vengeance against the monster that ate his beloved little sister.

 

Imagine if someone like Jotaro Kujo was a rooster.  Seriously, even the artwork is all gritty and realistic.

 

If I had to describe it, Rooster Fighter is a battle/horror comic much like Jojo, but with more comedy to it, from physical comedy to funny faces to our running gag of Japanese-style humor that I’ve talked so much about.  The demons are bizarrely humanoid and born from the everyday stresses of average people (for the most part).  Many of the characters can exhibit strange and bizarre personality traits (even Keiji, who often walks the line of Comically Serious).  And then we have the humor of a tiny ordinary rooster, not even two feet tall, running around on the skins of demons to peck at them once or twice before finishing them off with a sonic, shattering cock-a-doodle-doo.

 

Despite its premise, it is far south of the sliding scale of dumber comedy manga like Bobobo-bo-bobobo, or just another dumb isekai.  Not much is explained, but not much needs to.  There is occasional graphic violence and adult themes, but, at the end of the day, it’s just a goofy, fun romp.

 

That being said, while I will keep my eyes open for it when I go to the bookstore from now on, I doubt that I will be actually making a purchase of this series any time soon.

 

PS: I have recently begun following newly-released manga from Shonen Jump, albeit translated and released on their website every Sunday.

 

Do you people want to see me reviewing some of those?

 

Wait a second-I already have, back when I posted my review of Candy Flurry last year.  So I guess I will go ahead and do that, if I happen to run into another dry spell and find myself desperate for material to review.

 

Not like anyone really reads this blog, anyway…

 

(sigh)

 

Is Radio Even Still A Thing?

 

Okay, first of all, Happy New Year.  2023, baby.

 

Who’da thunk it?

 

This year, having learned my lesson from 2022, I tried to wait until early morning of New Year's Day to post this, so as not to have it accidentally count as a "last year" post again.  But then came family dinner, which took up the entire day (plus the Nuzlocke I was doing).  So that explains why you are getting this fresh new content on January 2nd.

 

But at least it does count towards 2023.

 

And now on to your scheduled first manga blog post of the year.  Two for two.

 

Now, Masaaki Nakayama hasn’t exactly written a ton of manga, but boy-do those few he has written stay with you!

 

I could liken his work to that of Junji Ito, in a way.  Many creatures, human (oid) and otherwise wind up being distorted to an unnerving effect in both Nakayama’s and Ito’s works.  And very few things from either of their manga ever really get a concrete and satisfying explanation.  But, for better or for worse, Nakayama apparently doesn’t share Ito’s medical background, which allows him to really give us the creepily-realistic details that he does.

 

Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.  Such lack of fine detail can often add to the unnatural-ness of whatever we’re seeing.

 

Nakayama also operates on a dark variation of the “Japanese humor” that I’ve talked so much about before on this blog; Rather than having someone do something goofy out of nowhere during a serious scene to break the tension (or vice-versa), Nakayama often has something horrifying or just plain weird and out-of-place appear out of nowhere in order to create horror.

 

It’s almost like the manga equivalent of a Jump Scare-again, like Ito, in that Ito often leaves the horrific images that his stories are always building up to on opposite pages, so that it’s up to the reader to turn the page of their own will and willingly invite the horrific image into their eyes and brains.

 

I think I might have seen some pictures from [Nakayama’s] earlier work Fuan No Tane (Seeds of Anxiety) online before, but I think PTSD Radio is/was the first manga of his that I’ve actually picked up and read.

 

Going by the tropes page for Fuan No Tane, said book was basically a collection of occasionally-related nonsensical ghost stories with little to no explanations and a ton of creepy shock value.

 

PTSD Radio is only mildly better in that regard.

 

We cut between POVs so fast that this reader was practically given whiplash, but there are a few loose threads that seem to tie together.

 

Chifuyu and Keita used to date, until a supernatural hair-pulling thing started to place a strain on their relationship.  Elsewhere and elsewhen, a little girl that we can assume to be a young Chifuyu is forced to have her head shaved by the traditions of her small rural village.  Her late mother also has her head shaved when she passes, which the village elders attribute to the appeasement of their god, Ogushi-sama.  In his name, people’s heads are shaved upon death (and apparently at other points in their lives) and their hair offered up in sealed boxes covered with talismans.

 

There are also crows that are connected to Ogushi-sama, as well.

 

The horror in these tales comes not only from the hideously distorted features and the seemingly random cosmic horror-like world that the characters live in, but also, as in his previous work, from the fear of being watched by or followed by something that you cannot see or understand.

 

So, naturally, in addition to the hair motif, there is also a serious eye motif going on throughout the work.  Eyes for watching, you see.  Eyes where they shouldn’t be, eyes NOT being where they should be, too many eyes, etc.

 

Each chapter is only a few pages long, which also does not help with overall story cohesion.  The book that I picked up from my local library was an omnibus containing Volumes 1 and 2 out of the 4 that there are, so one can hope for a concrete ending that ties everything all together, but I personally would not hold my breath.

 

If I happened to see the next and final volume omnibus available on my library shelves, I might pick it up just for the sake of trying to figure out what the heck is going on, but that’s it.  One can only stare at unsettling images for so long before you either get so creeped out by them that you never want to see them again, or else you get used to them and they lose their power.

 

But this is still only the first post of the new year, so, with luck, the next 8 series that I intend to review for this blog in 2023 will be of higher storytelling quality.