About.com Rating

The Bottom Line

Think of this book as providing a valuable public service. Most manga published in English is inoffensive in the extreme — there might be the occasional panty shot or gay makeout scene, but it's all in good fun and presented in a cute, polished package. We’ve come a long way from the early days of manga fandom, back in the 1980s, when people thought all manga was “tentacle porn.” Nowadays, we think of manga as kids' stuff.


But there’s a dark side to manga, and when we forget it, the Manga Gods wax wroth. They cause things like Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby to be published. So that we may learn.



Pros

• A classic of underground manga
• Endlessly imaginative
• Totally unique

Cons

• Is close to unreadable
• Contains all the worst things in the world
• ... Seriously, all of them

Description

• Original Title:Kaijin Bureiko Lullaby (Japan)
• Author & Artist: Takashi Nemoto
• Publishers:
  • Picturebox Inc. (US)
  • Seirin-Kogeisha Co., Ltd. (Japan)
• ISBN: 978-0979415326
• Cover Price: $19.95 US
• Age Rating:M – Mature, Age 18+ for everything you can think of, and several things you can't.
  More about content ratings.
• Manga Genres:
  • Gekiga (Graphic Novels)
  • Heta-uma (bad-good) Manga
  • Comedy
  • Horror
• US Publication Date: December 2008
  Japan Publication Date: April 1999
• Book Description: 194 pages, black and white illustrations
• More Manga by Takashi Nemoto:
  • "Black Sushi Party Piece" featured in AX: Alternative Manga Vol. 1

Guide Review - Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby

Takashi Nemoto is one of the legends of underground manga. First rising to prominence (or infamy) in the 1980s, he was one of the pioneers of the deliberately crude and ugly heta-uma (bad-good) art style. His manga, originally serialized in the seminal underground manga magazine Garo and various more obscure publications, cross every boundary of taste and decency in a giggly, dreamlike way. If, like me, you're curious about alternative and underground manga, you need to read Takashi Nemoto, so that you may know to what horrors your curiosity may lead you.

How can I explain Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby? Maybe a simple plot description or two will help. In the lead story in the collection, "Monster Man Bureikoh," an old man's penis rebels against its obnoxious, perverted owner by taking over his body; he flips over so the penis becomes the head, the feet become hands, and the old man's head takes the position of the genitals. The resulting creature, the Monster Man, sets out into the underbelly of urban society, where he ultimately becomes a cross-dressing prostitute. The longest story, "The World According to Takeo," follows the adventures of a human-sized sperm created from radiation when his "father" masturbated during a nuclear explosion.

By Nemoto's standards, these are pretty inoffensive concepts. The offensive stuff takes some buildup. Rape, incest, child molestation, cannibalism, giant pulsating radioactive penises-it's almost like Nemoto is going down a list of the world's most horrible things, except that most of it doesn't feel rehearsed; it's a flood of Id. The art has a similar thrown-together feeling, with the look of a grade-schooler's drawings; the later stories are somewhat more polished, but not by much.

Two things made the material at all bearable: Nemoto's gleeful naughty-little-boy sense of humor about his own filthiness, and the sweetness of most of his protagonists. Monster Man and Takeo are disturbing freaks, but they're basically decent people trying to get by in a world full of depravity. Of course, the same can't be said for the incessantly horny protagonist of "The Sex Rogue," who starts having sex while still in the womb (How? Oh, there are many answers) and eventually poses as an OB/GYN so he can rape a man's severed head and… Okay, that story crossed the "bearable" mark for me.

Some things are critic-proof, and Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby is probably one of them. I'm giving it four stars because it's the best heta-uma manga I've seen in translation so far (the pieces in anthologies like Comics Underground Japan didn't fascinate me like this one has), because it's not boring, and because one story in the collection is so pure it approaches true genius: "Pennise Life," the story of a nonverbal, penis-obsessed artist who finds nothing as engaging as his own crotch. It's like a self-referential summation of underground comics themselves.