Manga

The manga style which emerged after World War II combined elements of Japanese pop culture with the huge eyes of Disney characters like Scrooge McDuck. Over time its energetic approach won over fans around the world, and today it is a leading force in sales.

This gallery contains art from Shentu: Memories of Spring (2025) and Parasitic City #0.2 (2024). The former is a medieval wuxia story about an immortal rabbit warrior and her human padawan. It has conceptual overlap with the manga and anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

Parasitic City is a "far-out" story delving heavily into a sci-fi version of Buddhist Taoism. The basic concept is a future society in which everything is alive, from the furniture to the vehicles to the prosthetics worn by society's many war-ravaged amputees. Every one of these living creatures may have been human in a past incarnation, and hopes to be one again in the future. The poor are trapped in an endless cycle, forced to sell their karma credits to help their families, rather than improve their lot in their next incarnation. The rich buy that karma, ensuring they get better and better lives each time around the life cycle. Furthermore, every person (this is apparently part of Taoism) is indwelt by insects which are responsible for ongoing health or illness.

Other volumes of this series focus on the amputees and their parasitic prosthetics. This one deals with the latest apocalypse which likely heralds a coming reboot of the universe. As a result, whole city blocks are rolling up like a croissant, slicing buildings and people cleanly in two. Amazingly, this does not kill the people, whose two severed halves can operate independently.

This slicing aspect is what interested me when I saw the art drop at Hollow Press. When I was a kid, my parents had a bookshelf full of the World Book Encyclopedia. My favorite section was a set of transparencies of the human body which allowed me to peel back the layers of a human, seeing the muscles, the circulatory system, the nerves, the bones, vivisecting over and over as I flipped the pages back and forth. It probably helped fuel my interest in the medical field. Shintaro Kago must have been similarly fascinated by cross sections of human anatomy, perhaps obtained from full-body MRI reconstructions, since this issue is full of them in panel after panel.

My scanner renders all color images more red than they appear in real life. I tried to color-correct it in Photoshop, but the yellowest portions still came out looking orange. See the "additional images" section for smaller images with truer colors.

This gallery also contains examples of Manga style adopted by American comics creators.