Hell Girl, vol. 1
By Miyuki Eto
Rated OT, for Older Teens (16+)
Del Rey, $10.99
Nightmares for Sale, vol. 1
by Kaoru Ohashi
Rated OT, for Older Teens (16+)
Aurora, $10.99*
Presents, vol. 1
By Kanako Inuki
Rated M, for Mature readers (18+)
CMX, $12.99
One of the most interesting mini-genres of manga what John Jakala brilliantly named “comeuppance theater,” in which we get to watch someone behave badly and then pay a creative and usually bloody price for their sins.
There is something viscerally satisfying about watching a bad person being punished for their evil deeds. “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,” Longfellow wrote. The “slowly” part is the catch; we often see people get away with reprehensible things in real life, from the driver who dents a car in the parking lot and drives off to the CEO who runs a company into the ground and picks up a huge bonus check on his way out the door. They may get their just desserts, in this world or the next, but we don’t get to see it.
That’s why it’s fun to read books like these. They compress time and strip away all ambiguity, leaving a single story arc: Person does bad thing, person gets punished. In real life there are gray areas, and victims (especially of con games) are often complicit in their suffering. In fiction, such messy considerations would ruin the fun. What it boils down to is an innocent victim, an evil tormentor—and, hopefully, a creative storyteller.
Hell Girl is a particularly pure example of the genre. Each of the five stories in volume 1 features a truly awful villain—a girl who frames a classmate and then bullies her, a baker who steals recipes from his student and spreads rumors about her shop, a vet who neglects the animals in his care (except for those that belong to celebrities). It’s formulaic evil that never gets realistic enough to be disturbing. In each case the victim is driven to despair, unable to solve the problem, and—this is key—no one else believes her, so no one will help.
Then she hears about a mysterious website that can be accessed only at midnight. The website calls up Hell Girl, a huge-eyed, kimono-clad dispenser of justice. She strikes a hard bargain—the price of vengeance is that the victim will be sent to hell when she dies. Oddly, no one seems to be bothered by this. Once Hell Girl is hired, she really delivers the goods, interrupting the evildoer’s enjoyment of their ill-gotten gains to inflict a custom-tailored version of hell.
The book is very formulaic, down to the very words that Hell Girl says and the blurry chrysanthemums that she calls up every time she shows up to deliver justice. On the other hand, the torments are nicely designed and fit the villains quite well. The book isn’t really that scary, but it’s troubling that no one seems to be in the least bit bothered by the prospect of eternal damnation. Most simply enjoy getting the status quo back and resolve to enjoy the here and now.
Nightmares for Sale throws some really different twists into the revenge scenario. Creator Kaoru Ohashi squeezes six stories, one a two-parter, into volume 1, and each story follows a different path. In this series, the intervention is supplied by a supernatural pawnshop staffed by a loli girl (who is apparently much older than she looks) and a lovely boy, but their role is less straightforward than Hell Girl’s. Some of the stories involve a transaction with them, but in others, they simply stand around and the characters come in and tell them things.
The first two chapters are pretty straightforward tales, one of a bullied girl getting revenge, the other of a vain fashion model getting what she wishes for (which is never good in these books). After that, the stories get more interesting and twisted. People still get punished, but things are seldom what they appear to be on the first page, and most of the stories end ambiguously, with a hint that the dark forces are only temporarily banished. The writing is really quite clever, especially considering how short the chapters are. The art is uneven, however; some chapters are drawn in a very spare, linear style with toning substituting for shading and backgrounds, while other chapters are more fully developed. Often the art has a pale look because of the dependence on toning. Ohashi does some interesting things with the panels, often letting the story unfold in a series of thin vertical slices and using strong diagonals to keep the action moving. The production quality is almost too good—the high-quality, very white paper makes the thin lines and light toning look even paler, and the binding is rather stiff. Still, it’s a nice book and a decent read.
Presents is a series of cautionary tales, most beginning with a gift and ending with horrific death. Most of the characters are schoolchildren, and greed is the chief sin in the book: One greedy girl snatches presents away from the other kids, only to find that each box contains a different way to die; another pays little attention to the gifts she is given, until they gang up on her; and a woman who is only dating a guy for the bling he brings her gets a final delivery from beyond the grave. The chief actor in these stories is a little girl who didn’t get any birthday presents, thanks to a mean classmate’s trick, and therefore stays young forever. She pops up in different ways in each story, sometimes to help the victim, sometimes to deliver a gruesome judgment.
The style of Presents seems old-fashioned; the figures are rounded, with bug eyes and simple hair and clothes. This makes for some jarring contrasts—the stories all start out like children’s stories and end in madness, with melting faces or spilled guts. It’s all very imaginative, though, and it’s amazing how many different kinds of evil manga-ka Kanako Inuki can come up with, and how many different retributions she can confect, all based on the same theme.
Presents also has a greater degree of interior-ness than the other books; Hell Girl doesn’t care about the souls of the people she punishes, she’s just out for revenge. The little girl in Presents, on the other hand, is punishing people as much for their flaws—their greed or callousness—as for what they have actually done.
Of the three, Presents is definitely the most interesting read, with the most imaginative stories, although the art will probably not appeal to everyone. Nightmares for Sale has interesting stories but some weak points in the art, while Hell Girl is the most simplistic and formulaic, although the art is slick and professional. But all three deliver the solid satisfaction of watching bad things happen to bad people.
*Aurora has all their older titles, including this one, on sale for $5.00 if you buy through them.
These reviews are based on complimentary copies supplied by the publishers. But obviously, I’m not easily bought!