H. P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories

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By Gou Tanabe. Released in Japan by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic Beam. Released in North America by Dark Horse Comics. Translated by Zack Davisson.

This is the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations that are still being done in the pages of Enterbrain’s oddball magazine Comic Beam, home of Emma, Thermae Romae, and other hard-to-classify series. The mangaka, Tanabe Gou, has specialized in adapting horror titles to the comics page, and just reading a few pages into this volume will show you that he knows his stuff. This volume collects three of Lovecraft’s more well-known short stories and turns them into fairly gripping horror manga, with plenty of the author’s tortured, overdone prose, but not so much that you want to stop reading (as I frequently do with Lovecraft). Thankfully, the nameless horrors in these particular stories also don’t feature Lovecraft’s awful brand of racism that has led fans to back away from him a bit in modern times. You can enjoy them for what they are: scary stuff with no reasonable explanation.

We begin with “The Temple”, which takes place in WWII – something which may puzzle readers, as the story was written in the 1920s. The ‘about the author’ at the end mentions that Tanabe moved the action up a few decades, and honestly it works even better that way – the original U-Boat Captain was so villainous he may as well have been a Nazi. they find the head of an old Grecian statue on a dead British soldier, and its presence gradually makes the crew of the U-Boat lose its sanity – not helped by the captain shooting “traitors”. Soon he ends up discovering Atlantis underwater, and where that statue really came from. In “The Hound”, two men who enjoy grave robbing for kicks find a jade amulet and take it back to England, where they are soon haunted by the ghastly beast that they may have killed at the gravesite. Finally, in “The Nameless City”, there’s only our narrator, exploring a city in Arabia that no one dares go near, and finding (all together now) eldritch horrors beyond his comprehension.

Honestly, the plot is pretty much irrelevant. What matters most here is mood, and Tanabe nails it, particularly in The Hound, which I found the best of the three stories. The sense of an encroaching doom that will engulf our characters (all male – women rarely if ever appear in a Lovecraft story) grows more and more with every turn of the page, and the few actual shots of violence are striking. Lovecraft stories are about the unseen, the imagined, and the unimaginable. Therefore a lot of adaptations risk becoming silly by showing said unshowable evil and having it not measure up. Tanabe has just the right amount of balance, as The Temple relies on its narrator’s own villainous depths, and The Hound is glimpsed mostly in shadow and corners. The Nameless City does draw a few monsters in detail, but its viewpoint is still firmly on the narrator (and the amazing vistas that he’s passing through).

Lovecraft is not for everyone, and I would not blame people from passing simply based on the name. But if you like horror and want to read something really creepy and offputting, this is an excellent adaptation. He’s done more of these – I think The Colour Out of Space was also adapted – and I hope it does well enough that we see more.

Kagerou Daze VII: From the Darkness

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By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Kevin Gifford.

Each volume in the series has competed to see who in the Mekakushi Dan has the worst childhood, and we may have a new winner with Kido, who gets the focus here. The book is divided into two parts that it goes back and forth between, like previous volumes in the series. The main story continues, with Shintaro, the Mekakushi-Dan and a newly revived Takane trying to find a way to stop Tateyama – or rather, whatever is behind Tateyama – and figure out how to stop this whole mess. This is interspersed with Kido’s childhood, being a child of an affair whose mother then dies several years later, causing her to be taken in by her rich father. Kido is an introverted self-hating mess, which honestly fits pretty well with what we’ve seen of present-day Kido, so the flashbacks work pretty well. Luckily, she also has a big stepsister looking out for her. Unluckily, this book is called “From the Darkness”.

Kido’s sections are the strongest in the book, doing a good job (despite the author’s self-deprecation in the afterword) of a realistic young girl resented by most people in the mansion, ignored by her father, and waiting to be abused by a sister that she’s sure hates her. But Rin does not, in fact, hate her, and after a series of painful to read but oh so accurate scenes of Kido wondering when the next blow is going to fall, she gradually begins to open up to the other girl and speak. Unfortunately, her dad is not merely cold and withdrawn, he’s rather unhinged, something which I wish was written in a slightly less abrupt way – the shortness of these books means that sometimes motivations get either left out or reduced to a villain monologue, and in this case it’s the later, as Kido’s father insanely expounds on why he went mad. After tragedy strikes, Kido finds herself in Azami’s realm, where Azami – rather startled to be meeting someone – realizes that Kido has one of her Eyes, and tries to explain as best she can. This section works much better.

Things don’t get much better in the main storyline, where we learn that you rarely gain a cool cyborg body without its creator having the ability to take the body over and turn it evil. Balanced against this is the reunion of Shintaro and Takane, who has to explain why she did what she did as Ene – which is fairly heartwarming – and why she ACTED like she did as Ene – which is the funniest part of the book. Unfortunately, while Shintaro’s plan to take out Tateyama is a good one, as I said, it reckons without one of the group being possessed. And so how we end the book with Shintaro dead, Kido dead, everyone else presumably about to die, and the realization that Book 8 not only may be the last but also isn’t out in Japan yet. This will have to satisfy Kagerou Daze fans for now, but I think it will do a fine job.

Also, will Seto ever get developed?

Princess Jellyfish, Vol. 5

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By Akiko Higashimura. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Kuragehime” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Kiss. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Sarah Alys Lindholm.

I realize that it is coincidence, but frequently the volume of Princess Jellyfish that I am reading is there to answer the questions and concerns I mentioned in my review of the previous volume. Last time I talked about wanting Kuranosuke to have to deal with consequences and be thrown off his game more, and I also mentioned the market for the jellyfish dresses being upscale and not for people like Tsukimi. Lo and behold, in this volume Kuranosuke is not only dealing with once again being told how hard it is to be a successful clothing maker in the world today, but also has to stand by and suck it up as Shu and Tsukimi get close enough to start dating, although given the two of them are still talking at cross-purposes a bit, I’m not sure if that’s going to be an endgame. And yeah, what fashion would Amars, the most unfashionable, wear?

Amars is actually pretty impressive here; for all that they may whine and complain a lot (especially Mayaya), they’re very much involved in both saving the apartment complex and getting the jellyfish brand out there. And the biggest worry of the book, how they will react when they hear that Tsukimi and Shu are going out, also turns out to less of a crisis than expected – Shu is, after all, the son of a politician and being groomed for greater things. Ergo, a political marriage would be a godsend for the rest of Amars. Of course, as a reader I’m not entirely convinced that Tsukimi would make a very good politician’s wife. As for the dresses, now that we’ve established the high-end dresses, we need cheaper stuff for the casual buyer. But what if the casual buyer is Amars? Would they wear this stuff? Not a chance. So.. what WOULD they willingly buy?

This volume features not one, not two, but THREE characters slowly realizing that they’ve fallen in love, each with different impact. Tsukimi is the most obvious, adn I’m still not sure it’s sunk in for her, or even if she grasps what it means going forward. The proposal certainly hasn’t sunk in. Inari, meanwhile, hears from Shu that he has a “fiancee” at the apartments, and is horrified not just at the idea that one of those girls (she doesn’t know which one) could have bewitched him but that it hurts her enough for her to realize that she has genuine feelings of love for Shu as well. As for Kuranosuke, I think he’s the furthest behind, as he’s not really admitting to himself at all how he really feels about Tsukimi even as he distances himself by saying he’s the “sorcerer” who placed a spell on her to make her a “princess”. Which is all very well and good, but sounds pretty cowardly to me.

They just announced the manga is wrapping up in Japan this fall, though we still have a few omnibuses to go to catch up. In the meantime, it gets better with each volume, and if you haven’t picked it up yet you should.