Darwin's Diaries - The Eye of the Celts

For a while now Cinebook has been forging its own path as a publisher of translated French and Belgian comics in English-speaking territories, and has rapidly gained a solid reputation for its wide range of quality titles. While much of it output has consisted of classic titles for an audience who never had a chance to read them before (much in a similar way to how English-speaking audiences are only now really discovering Osamu Tezuka’s manga), it’s good to see them also putting out more recent titles such as Darwin’s Diaries.

It’s the mid-Victorian era and an unknown something in the night is out tearing people to shreds. With a rising number of incidents and only a handful of witnesses, the rumours start to fly. Having published his work On the Origin of Species the previous year, Darwin’s is called in by the prime minister to determine what unidentified creature is committing these violent atrocities. As if his theory of evolution wasn’t already controversial enough, dabbling in potential areas of folklore and myth threaten to jeopardise his scientific legitimacy and social standing.

It’s an interesting concept to take a popular scientific theory and make a horror story out of it. Depicting a dark and truly grim England with a dingy palette and grisly violence, Darwin’s Diaries is less a world of scientific discovery than it is a broken one. Darwin himself gets into drunken fights and sets about screwing whores once he’s out of sight of his wife and kids. Whether it’s a commentary on a man defying the teachings of his world, or just an attempt to ensnare its readers into its flawed protagonist, there are a lot of ingredients thrown into this comic for the reader to take as the mystery continues to deepen and intrigue. To be honest I could’ve done without the misjudged attempts feminism, presented in form of Darwin’s smirkingly patronising sidekick, but otherwise this is a solid mystery story that is high on gore and low on answers. Basically everything I need to be interested in reading the next volume!

Hell Baby

Okay, we're getting onto the good/more bizarre stuff now. ^_^

Hideshi Hino's is one of those artists who you classify as being 'an acquired taste', which makes it quite difficult to describe the appeal of his work. His style is exaggerated, possibly cartoonish for some, ugly for others, but Hell Baby is a good example of Hino at his most stark and dramatic.

Born a hideous deformity and having a taste for blood, an anonymous baby is dumped on the garbage tip and left to rot. Dying, and then mysteriously resurrecting, the girl lives a life of drinking mud and chewing on putrefying animal corpses just in order to maintain her own decomposing body. Anybody still with me? Then I shall continue... After a few years of crawling and grunting about the girl comes to feel a certain absence in its life, and ventures into the city in search for the family that cast her out. So after a cannibalistic killing spree she finds them and is granted the chance to take revenge on them all.

It's hard to say just what kind of message Hino is trying to send, but for me its darkly satirical method and pulpy vibe should be taken only at face value as pure entertainment. It's a wrong'un to be sure, but those made of sterner stuff (and possessing a twisted sense of humour) would do well to chance it.

Converts would do well to venture elsewhere into the Hino Horror series. 14 volumes emerged before it got cancelled, and they vary in quality vastly, but for an artist who's relatively unknown in the western (at least to most manga fans) there's a pretty decent amount of English material out there.

Mermaid Saga

Rumiko Takahashi is a long-standing mangaka, most well known these days of Inu Yasha, Ranma 1/2 and Urusei Yatura. She's incredibly prolific, easily capable of churning out books by the dozen, but while more often than not her titles start out strongly, after 15 or so volumes they start to run out of steam and recycle to same jokes and ideas.

Mermaid Saga is comparatively short at 4 volumes, so though not wanting to venture 50+ volumes of Inu Yasha, but still wanting their Takahashi-styled supernatural/monster fix would do very well to check this out.

Centering on the premise that eating the flesh of a Mermaid will make you immortal, the series follows a young-appearing couple who have notched a fair few hundred years between them while investigating rumours surrounding the mermaid in hopes of escaping its curse. The promise of immortality is always prone to attract the worst sort of people, so it's no surprise that a steady line of nutjobs are after it and will take anyone who gets in their way. Ranma never had to deal with having one of his eyes gouged out, but this is the level of nastiness that Takahashi introduces here which may surprise fans of her lighter work. The violence is ugly with many of the characters being irredeemable obsessives. It makes for gripping reading and its short length means it doesn't outstay its welcome.

It's a short and sweet entry in Takahashi's works, and one I'd put as being essential reading alongside Maison Ikkoku (trust me, it's really good). Hardcore fans can dive right into her more epic works, but for sampling her more interesting and intense work, I'd go for this one.