Volumes: 7/7 (Complete eBooks), 2/2 (Complete Omnibuses), In Print
Seinen
Genre: Surreal Comedy, Dark Comedy, Horror, Scifi
Summary: This is a bizarre collection of one chapter each short stories that are centered around Yukie Sakai, a young woman who works as a carer for the elderly. Except each story quickly warps into a surreal, dark comedy as poor Yukie gets stuck in ridiculous and impossible situations. These stories include things such as: a grandma who’s wrinkled, folded skin hides another dimension, apartment death bingo, Santa with dementia, infectious wrinkles, Killer Dentures, a cursed Diaper plague, elderly people battle royale, and many more!
Review: This series really surprised me how funny it was. This mangaka, Shintaro Kago, is most famous for his ero-guro works in Japan, and I tried to read Super-Dimensional Love Gun but got too grossed out and couldn’t finish it. But I might try again after reading this.
These are all short stories with the theme of elderly people and often with dementia. But it’s just the bizarre theme behind a crazy comedy. The short stories are subversively funny and they find humor in a dark concept. If I had to pick a favorite, I thought the story with the psychic grandma who explodes anything she has forgotten to be darkly hilarious. But there were many, many others that were also pretty entertaining too.
The majority of the short stories in this series are surreal/dark comedy, and then a few Horror and Scifi stories are in there as well. Overall the quality of the stories is very consistently original and creative, although it did kind of feel like he started running out of ideas towards the end in volume 7. But overall, very good.
Recommended: If you want to read an absurdist, bizarre dark comedy, this is really better than you'd expect. But if you find the premise distasteful, then you probably won't enjoy it.
Rating: Older Teen: this is more comedy than horror, and is not that graphic at all. But it is twisted. Also, between the 2 releases, the Book Cloud eBooks use Comic Sans and it’s kind of ugly. The Fantagraphics releases OTOH are gorgeous.
Other Works by this mangaka in English: Super-Dimensional Love Gun, (but this is nothing like Dementia 21), Secret Comics Japan (1 story in an Anthology), The Princess of the Never-Ending Castle
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