After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn’t done with him.
Shiozawa forges ahead with an independently published manga project. But the manga creators around him are crumbling into chaos—Chosaku drinks himself into ever less productivity over worries about his career and family, a longtime creator can’t discern the difference between fiction and fantasy, and Aoki disappears rather than face the deadlines for his new hit series. Sometimes, the simple pleasure of an apple is worth more than all the fame and toil of making manga
A headless busty blonde, a face-stealing psychopath, a sleazy serial-killer sculptor, a horny handsome hunchback, a vengeful caterpillar cuckold, a torturous hangover in the pits of hell.
Welcome to the raunchy and gristly world of FACE MEAT, from the decadent imagination of outlaw polymath Bonten Taro―ex-kamikaze, ex-yakuza, singer, songwriter, actor, world-famous tattooist, husband of seven, and underappreciated pioneer of “pinky violence” femme fatales and adult horror manga. While Mizuki Shigeru and Umezz Kazuo were paving the way for horror in shonen and shojo magazines in the 1960s, Bonten was secretly doing the same in erotic men’s rags―and the results are as trashy as you’d expect. With an essay by Bonten booster and B-gekiga expert Kunisawa Hiroshi, FACE MEAT includes fourteen hair- and pants-raising stories that have never before been assembled under a single cover in any language!
FACE MEAT is the fourth volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.
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