“Perhaps mummies are like cocoons waiting to hatch.”
In Koga Shinichi’s Mansect (1975), a bug-obsessed loner begins a grisly transformation into a humanoid insect – or an insect-like humanoid. If you think you can more or less imagine where this is going, you’re probably wrong.
“[S]tanding with Umezz Kazuo as one of the pioneers of shojo horror manga,” according to the biography provided in the back of the Smudge reissue of Mansect, Koga’s most famous work is probably Eko Eko Azarak, and his surprisingly gruesome and macabre stories have been “cited as a central influence by many horror manga authors, including Ito Junji and Kojima Miyaco.”
I haven’t read any of Koga’s other manga, but the weirdness and viciousness of Mansect definitely feels like a precursor of both Ito and Hideshi Hino, the latter of whom was already working when Mansect was first published, so I can’t speak to possible influence.
Instead of the expected variation on George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” which was adapted into the film series of the same name starting in 1958, Mansect is a story of body horror at once intimate and strangely apocalyptic. The suffering of Hideo, the eponymous “mansect,” takes on the proportions of echoing all of human frailty, expanding to include and affect disparate and seemingly unrelated characters, musings about mummies, bizarre ailments such as “cutaneous horn,” and more.
“Our society may be plagued by numerous unidentified diseases and disorders,” as the story’s closing narration avers, “but viewed from a longer perspective, are not diseases and mutations the very drivers of human evolution.”
While a fascinating and extremely worthy addition to the Smudge line of manga reissues, Mansect is not quite as directly geared to me, personally, as UFO Mushroom Invasion. But one relatively minor thing really caught my attention while reading it. Though Mansect may not directly reference the Langelaan or Kurt Neumann version of The Fly, the manga is littered with visual nods to the horror films of the early 20th century.
Some of these are obvious and direct. Speculation about mummies is accompanied by a panel depicting a famous image of Boris Karloff from Universal’s The Mummy (1932). Others are more oblique. As Hideo’s transformation first begins, he catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror that reflects early film villains, including Lionel Atwill’s disfigured sculptor in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).
A depiction of a patient suffering from “cutaneous horn” echoes Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. Perhaps the most striking of all of them, however, is one of the forms that Hideo’s transformation passes through, what a neighbor girl refers to as “Big Brother.”
Though ultimately more horrible, Big Brother could have stepped right off the screen of The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Notably, while the previous Creature from the Black Lagoon movies dealt with the gillman as an “orphan of time;” an evolutionary cul-de-sac that broke off from an earlier bridge between “terrestrial and marine life” and became fixed there, unchanging throughout the centuries, The Creature Walks Among Us sees the gillman surgically altered into a new, air-breathing creature by a scientist who is obsessed with changing humans to better survive in inhospitable environments such as outer space – subjects that are also echoed in Mansect.
Seeing a shojo artist like Koga Shinichi referencing these early American horror films is fascinating on its own merits, but the ways in which the themes of these films, which reflect the torment of their monstrous agonists, also reinforce the subtexts of Mansect adds another layer of satisfaction to what is already a striking, haunting, and gruesome masterpiece.
My only complaint is that Mansect doesn’t include the same sort of detailed appreciation and bibliography of Koga’s work that previous Smudge releases have boasted, so I can’t page through them and daydream about being able to read these other bizarre and horrific manga.
[EDIT: It seems that I posted prematurely. No sooner had this gone live than I saw a post from translator Ryan Holmberg explaining that their license for Mansect did not allow them to include any add-ons in the actual book, and that the essay that would normally have been there – an appreciation from Okubo Taro – is instead housed on his website and can be read in full here. Day saved!]
