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If you’re anything like me, you can’t watch anything horror-related without being genuinely disturbed by the horror on display without cracking the tension. That’s right, there are dozens of bored moviegoers among us (dozen!) and reading manga from good people This is Junji Not necessarily something you can do in one sitting because of the relentlessly gruesome body horror you see through the blink of an eye in a wide sitting. So if you want to cozy up with a good manga this Halloween, look no further Jack Creger uncivilized Scary and more weapons Funny scary – with a hint of crazy Smiling friends Humor to reduce discomfortDementia 21 The perfect manga for you.
Dementia 21created by Shintaro KagoYuki follows Sakai, a home health aide who prides herself on her service with the elderly. Yuki All about making his clients smile; Instead, they awarded him top marks for his selfless, dedicated in-home living service, even if it cost him in the process. Before long, all her hard work, verging dangerously close to toxic positivity, comes close to paying off when she lands the position of best live-in nurse at Green Net, a private aged care service company.
That is, until her co-worker has a case of bad eyesight and, after a tryst with their married boss, urges Yuki to fudge the numbers to prevent her from becoming a legend as the top scorer in three months. While the boss can’t accede to his request, he turns things around by turning all his clients into old men with supernatural powers to set Yuki up for failure.
To say that would be regressive Dementia 21 It’s a more comedic vein of Ito-style horror. Kago’s absurd, utterly phantasmagoric work is too wild to be confined to such a blanket, common point of comparison. From the first moment I opened the book, it was very clear that the formative surrealist influences of Salvador Dali’s Kago, the dark humor of Yasutaka Tsutsui and akira Creator Katsuhiro Otomo’s dense, detailed, and expressive art style was the creative core of the immediately arresting work he created for himself. Dementia 21.
The first volume is a kind of “kisu mangaka” (weird manga creator) and an “ero guro nonsensu” (erotic malice) artist, mixing sex, horror and absurdity in a way that distorts reality through radical visuals and provocative themes, laughs and gasps that stick together. Does that mean he has to stop AI-powered dentures from creating a hivemind to take over the world or quell political assassinations with pulley-delivered buckets in a series of sky-high project nursing home visits? so be it
To give you a taste of how all of the above bold gestures play out in the manga, I’ll walk you through some of my favorite adventures of Yuki from its first volume.
An honorable mention to a story where Yuki is forced to drive with an older man who refuses to give up his license (been there). There’s no supernatural mumbo jumbo here, just absurd humor. Yuki white-knuckles it as a commuter princess in a madcap highway adventure where her town has roads and laws that allow freeways to lead to driving under the influence, heart attacks, toxic waste, and suicide—all to Yuki’s absolute horror. Gurley just wants the patrolling cop who bothers them to get out of the lane and pull them over if they don’t have any of those conditions. If his geriatric road rage driving license isn’t revoked, at least he should be freed from this freeway nightmare.
But the first of my three favorite stories, in no particular order, begins with the infectiously feisty and exuberant Yuki taking care of a legally independent geriatric Ultraman, using construction equipment to change his diapers and shovel into a giant bowl. He handles things well, all things considered, until his cosmic nemesis comes one after another to challenge him in his old age. Their old-man rambles serve as more of a nuisance to the townspeople, who ask him to find a way to move with them, without sidetracking, forgetting what they came for, and wasting everyone’s more time, leaving unprepared for anything. It’s a simple, fashionable paranoia-type horror story, but despite being fun and low-effort, the manga also features aliens as a tone setter for the kind of impossible tasks Yuki must do with a smile.
My second-favorite story sees Yuki endure a hellish nurse boot camp under the tutelage of her overbearing mother (who must have once been the best in-house nurse ever). Frustrated that Yuki still hasn’t won gold, she sends her daughter through the ringer in a black bag to a rookie nurse bootcamp. After carrying mannequins through minefields and blistering blizzards, and under barbed wire fences (all without feeding and diaper changing), Yuki emerges as an elderly care animal whose raison d’être is home care. It gets so out of hand that he is detained by the US military for deployment in enemy territory, giving them great care for their need to fight, eliminate war and achieve world peace.
And my absolute favorite story is the one where Yuki has to take care of an old lady with amnesia (just like the manga’s title!) While I, through Yuki, found the old lady’s family a bit annoyingly eccentric, going to great lengths to make sure she remembers them as her beloved grandchildren, it became clear why they were so annoying. The catch is that a world-ending supernatural gift also touches the old woman: if she forgets something—be it a person or an idea—they will explode in a mist of viscera, which she does as soon as she meets Yuki. “Who are you again?” Blast the grandchildren. “That’s a beautiful dog. Whose is it?” The puppy popped. Her amnesiac powers become even more hyperspecific with what she destroys, removing concepts of toupees, “fake moms” and “virgins” and leaving people burning like spent fireworks.
It’s a delightfully surprising adventure that can’t necessarily be solved but worked around, thanks to Yuki digging deep and giving it 110 percent, helping to administer an anti-dementia drug that tracks as fast as a dagger to her client, bringing back all the forgotten ideas and people, but bringing me together.
Anecdotally speaking, an aspect that discovers Dementia 21 Such a breath of fresh air that the whole deal is covering manga and anime and tired of just listening to or thinking about gross-out horrors I happened upon manga by pure chance while checking out the local brick-and-mortar bookstore. with no futzing Manga reading app‘ Payment services that increasingly feel like live services gatcha game nickel and diming usersLimits how many chapters they can get in a day before coughing up more dough to “rent” them for a limited time. Just trade in the old-school for cheap (as this particular second-hand donation-based bookstore sold it for $13 against the market price of $30).
So if you’re a comedy-horror pastiche-enjoying manga reader, definitely check it out Dementia 21 And put dirty pedestrians on the rubberneck of the bus over your shoulders.The horror and slapstick comedy oozes out of its pages like I’ve enjoyed since I picked it up.
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