UFO Mushroom Invasion

by Marina Shirakawa, Ryan Holmberg (editor)

“UFOs are one of the world’s greatest mysteries...and I hope they stay that way. For the day that aliens reveal themselves may very well become the beginning of the end of life on Earth as we know it!”

A flying saucer crashes deep in the mountains of Japan. Wary of the hyper-intelligent beings they find inside, the government hides from the public all news of the alien craft. But it’s not the strange visitors themselves that they should be afraid of―the real danger is the parasitic spores smuggled aboard! Will Earth survive the UFO MUSHROOM INVASION?!

Originally published in 1976, Shirakawa Marina’s UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is a masterpiece of sci-fi horror. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Japanese folklore and the supernatural, Shirakawa created one of manga history’s cult classics and an unforgettably creepy entry in the canon of spore-horror. With an essay by weirdologist Udagawa Takeo, UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is the second volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

Genres: Manga, Horror, Comics, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Japan

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Marina Shirakawa (白川 まり奈, Shirakawa Marina, 1940-2000) was a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator.
His manga touched on bizarre themes and situations, such as UFO's, time-travels, vampires and zombie cats, as exemplified in his most famous work UFO Mushroom Invasion (1976). As an illustrator and folklorist, Shirakawa worked on projects related to Japanese paranormal folklore (especially yokai, Japanese ghosts) and H.P. Lovecraft.

Reviews

[Vicente Ribes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entretenido manga vintage que no deja de ser un homenaje japo a la ciencia ficción clásica con unos extraños hongos convirtiendo a los humanos en zombies e invadiendo la tierra. El dibujo clasico recuerda mucho a Kazuo Umezu y la historia esta entretenida pero le falta un poquito de originalidad al asunto.

[Stay Fetters · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It’s probably best that UFOs remain a mystery to humans. After all, the day they reveal themselves to us may very well become the day of our annihilation."

UFOs and Aliens have been something that I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. The mystery surrounding them and how the government kept their lips sealed made me want to believe even more. *looks toward the sky* The truth is out there. *cue the X-Files theme song*

I love that they’ve been rereleasing these long out of print horror mangas. Never thought I would be reading such classic horror and I love it. They are some of the most bizarre mangas that I have ever read. It’s what my mind and soul craves. It’s magnificent.

This one was out there. The art was grotesquely fabulous and I couldn’t get enough. It really added that hair-raising effect to the story. Overall, this was amazing and I can’t wait for more of these releases.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Copying my review from Edelweiss, where I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this manga:

I was more than pleasantly surprised by this 1976 sci-fi horror manga! The title, while accurate, may convey a sillier idea of what the reader is in store for. This was a genuinely scary read that starts off as a UFO invasion story, and then jumps around to folklore, science, body horror, and a strong environmental message. There was a definite Invasion of the Body Snatchers element, and it even steered into a little bit of a Life After People-vibe at its extremely bleak finale. This feels ahead of its time, and is highly recommended.

[Ags · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible. I recommend!!

So fun, and sad, and wistful and bittersweet and so, so campy and weird. This felt really in conversation with Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation," and would be a quick, fun read for fans of "The Last Of Us" (HBO).

I loved the mushroom facts/mushroom folktale interludes, and how they functioned to do little time jumps in the plot. Really cool art, especially depicting many kinds of mushrooms and different ideas about alien life. Interesting twist to there being alien life already on earth (shout out to the fungi kingdom). Also, interesting implication of the zombie fungus-infected people resembling some atomic bomb survivors. I wondered about yokai influences, too.

The language is stiff, but I think that's the 70's scifi style.

There is a concluding essay in this edition. I appreciated its brief shout-outs to some art and story style choices (e.g., one sentence about a-bomb survivors, a reference to the mystery + horror effect of the "old-timey" art, a few setences about categories of alien encounter fiction). I would have loved a longer concluding essay! But, I guess that just means that I really liked this.

[Rick Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable blend of classic '70s sci-fi with horror, environmentalism and folklore, UFO Mushroom Invasion is a fairly ambitious long form manga that depicts a school hiking trip that is disrupted by the discovery of alien mushrooms in the wilderness. Shirakawa Marina's approach is fairly reminiscent of Kazuo Umezz both in terms of illustrative style as well as the prominent use of children as the primary characters. The horror is palpable at times as the presentation of an invasive fungi species leading to very "Body Snatcher" type situations was well executed, even if the story lingers a fair bit too long. What could have been a decent horror short is stretched thin over a fairly overindulgent narrative featuring government agencies and connections to classic folktales. What does work really well is the cheesy B-movie vibe which couples well with Marina's stiff illustrations. Worth checking out for fans of classic horror manga.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introductory essay is 5 stars.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely loved the art. The story was okay, some parts about philosophy of life on earth/nature. Nothing that blew my mind but interesting to page through. Would like to read other works by the mangaka in the future.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a teen, I watched “Day of Triphids”—a precursor to “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.” It is plausible that in the vastness of the universe, one form that alien life might come in is a parasitic life form similar to Venus flytraps or fungi (although fungi also have many beneficial aspects as well). This manga imagines a worst case scenario with bizarre and disturbing art as people are twisted into mushroom fodder. Now there’s a monster you don’t see every day!

[Benjamin Bauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must be brave. My family would rather be dead than turned into mushroom zombies!

A wonderful sci-fi follow-up to Smudge's preceding release, Her Frankenstein. UFO Mushroom Invasion is creepy, funny, and visually surreal.

The book follows a young boy named Aoki. During a hiking trip in the Ubagatake mountains, Aoki injures his leg. He and his teacher Sada stay at a cabin while he recovers, only to witness a UFO crash. The next day, the UFO is cordoned off by one Doctor White, who insists on quarantining Aoki and Sada sensei after he grows annoyed with their questions about the UFO. What follows is the gradual emergence of a fungal nightmare from beyond that imperils all life on Earth.

If you're a fan of Japanese sci-fi films of the fifties to seventies period, then this book is a must-read. It perfectly walks the line between a boy's adventure kinda yarn and an unsettling sci-fi horror tale. The mangaka Marina was obsessed with folklore and yōkai, so you get the added treat of the book occasionally cutting from the main narrative to delve into folktales about mushrooms.

The art can be awkward. The character designs are old-fashioned and stiff. Some of the panels where Aoki is running to or from things look particularly odd. There's even a continuity error that evoked B-movie gaffes for me where Aoki's clothes (and wounds!) revert to his preceding outfit for a splash page.

The character designs being as normal as they are, though, may be part of what emphasizes just how far out the actual scenes of horror are. Marina illustrates his fungal creations with incredible love and detail. His renderings of apocalyptic scenes and outer space are also breathtakingly ominous.

This volume, as with the previous one, concludes with a wonderful essay. I believe in Shirakawa Marina! by Udagawa Takeo. If you're like me, it'll leave you wishing this mangaka's other UFO and horror manga were available in English.

Smudge sets the bar high with this release. I can't wait for their next book, Mansect. This line could very well end up being something akin to the Criterion Collection for obscure horror manga.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I saw the title and premise of this graphic novel, I knew it was too temptingly weird to pass up. This sci fi/horror is filled with a bizarre alien fungus storyline, side forays into mushroom folklore, and hilarious over-the-top dialogue such as, "Nooo! Nooo! Nooo! I'm a human and I want to stay that way! Mushrooms suck!"

[Aurelio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un cómic que refleja un interés y una perspectiva de la ciencia ficción UFO y terror desde una visión manga de época.
Aporta ese toque retro cuando fue dibujado en los años 70 y añadimos la información de las leyendas japonesas sobre los hongos, entretenimiento fandom.

[Dan P · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly straightforward alien invasion disaster story with some fun gnarly art. So happy this series of kashihon era horror manga is being brought over. Thank you Living the Line and Ryan Holmberg 🙏

[Doreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

translated and edited by historian Ryan Holmberg as part of Smudge, "a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga".

Honestly, this was rad and creepy all at once. The original manga was published in 1976, and has been translated and repackaged here for English-speaking audiences, with illuminating essays and notes to boot. Shirakawa Marina loved both space stories and Japanese folklore, and combines them with aplomb in this tale of alien horror.

Aoki is on a hiking trip with his classmates when he hurts his leg, necessitating that he and one of his teachers, Sada, stay overnight in a remote mountain cabin while the rest of his class returns to Shizuoka. That evening, a great crash rouses Aoki, Sada and their elderly host. The adults are shocked to find that a UFO has crashed nearby. After telling their host to go get help, Sada puts Aoki on his back and goes to take a closer look at the crash site. Despite Aoki's pleas, Sada doesn't want to get too close, just in case the UFO actually does pose a threat.

Nearly twelve hours later, government officials come to secure the crash site. Sada and Aoki are whisked away to a facility where they discover, to their dismay, that the truth is being covered up. Aoki's visiting mother and sister laugh at his story of a UFO, repeating the official line that it was just a meteorite. But when the news starts reporting that other "meteorites" have been falling all over Japan and the rest of the world, Aoki and Sada both suspect that that UFO was just the herald of a far greater menace to humanity than they'd ever imagined.

The main plot is interspersed with Japanese folktales of weird and/or monstrous mushrooms that only serve to underscore how very strange fungi are, and how unsettling people have almost always found them. The story overall is neatly done, feeling very cinematic even as the artistic style hews closely to old school manga, with almost cutesy main characters contrasting sharply with the monstrosities that take over towards the end. The focus on environmental justice makes this feel like the spiritual predecessor to Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, with more than a frisson of Liu Cixin's Remembrance Of Earth's Past. Don't worry tho, this book is entirely self-contained within its 200 or so pages.

Being a horror manga, UFO Mushroom Invasion definitely isn't for the faint of heart. Tho there's nothing in it that would make this book earn anything more restrictive than a PG-13 rating, it can be rather graphically unsettling, but no worse than any realistic depiction of, say, actual zombie fungi. It's definitely an interesting view of humanity's place in the cosmos.

UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina was published September 17 2024 by Living The Line and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!

This review originally appeared at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.

[Abhishek Jamalabad · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're here, you may already know this, but for the uninitiated - this book is the kind of thing that is not necessarily a great story, but is to be treasured for being a wonderful reproduction of something from an obscure past (at least to global audiences.)

I enjoyed this more than the first Smudge volume (Her Frankenstein), mostly because the themes it deals with are up my alley - fungi, parasites, biological invasions, and the speculation of a world without humans. The bits of mushroom-themed folklore included by the author make this extra fun. As I said at the start, the story is not particularly great - it's very predictable and quite steadily anticlimactic (to me) - but the story is not entirely the point of getting this book. The art is as stunning as any great horror manga. The section with Shirakawa Marina covers (in colour) is beautiful.

The essay included at the end is the only thing I actually felt should have been much more interesting than it was. Most of it was like an information dump, rather than insightful. I also wish a better font were used for the essay, preferably some kind of nice-looking serif font.

All things considered, the Smudge line is an incredible project, also big in scale, being taken on by a tiny team. Kudos to them for that. I believe every title they put out is going to be worth exploring.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smudge has delivered the English-speaking world another obscure horror manga, this time a strange pulpy UFO story from Shirakawa Marina. Long before The Last of Us, Shirakawa explored the idea of an apocalypse of fungi taking over the human nervous system as they do to insects. The essay at the back explores the history of UFO anxieties in Japan and suggests that the mangaka was immersed in this bizarre subculture, which flavors the text with a certain outsider-artist quality. The mangaka also includes a number of tangents about UFO lore as well as the tales of mushrooms in Japanese folklore. Visually the art here is nothing phenomenal, with a certain crude sloppiness to a lot of the images, but the way the mushroom-men are rendered is genuinely upsetting, all these tubes glowing in a way reminiscent of the Kirby krackle. Lots of the images recall the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there is a deep mournful quality to a lot of the images. The ending is very sudden and very bleak, suggesting that maybe we would all be happier as mushroom men- no more homework, at least.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marina Shirakawa’s book is another amusing trifle rescued from obscurity through the efforts of Ryan Holmberg, who has a career-spanning essay about this lesser creator at the end of the book (the detailed critical essay from Takeo Udagawa that precedes it (also translated by Holmberg) is quite good).

The book’s premise is simple: a UFO crashes and spreads a fungal plague, the fungus having come aboard the UFO as it inspected some space debris. This is fine, but what’s really notable here are the drawings of the humans who are consumed by the mushrooms (Shirakawa’s drawings of people are deliberately old-school manga, supposedly per Udagawa to heighten the contrast with his weird monster drawings) + the well-illustrated folk stories about mushrooms in Japanese culture (perhaps I’ll check out his Yodai Picture Story, which is apparently nothing but that). It’s no masterpiece, but benefits from a Twilight Zone-style ending in which humans in denial are simply consumed by the mushrooms and the planet is purified again. Not bad if you like this sort of thing.

[Dbgirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

UFO Mushroom Invasion is an honest sci-fi drivel even the title included. The plot was very simple, so was art, but it didn’t bother me. The story was good and it could have even been horrible if there just wouldn’t have been (unintended?) humour. The reading experience was interrupted every now and then some random infos about UFOs and mushrooms by the mangaka. It could have been very annoying if they wouldn’t been so interesting and funny to read. Even it wasn’t that unique, it still had personality and it was exactly the kind of cult stuff I’ve always wanted to read, so thanks a million to the publisher who bothered to release this in the West (and thanks to my local library who had dared to pick this on their selection)! It was interesting and fun to read about the author’s other works. Some of them sounded very wild stuff and it could be nice to read those too!

[Ángel Javier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excelente mezcla entre terror y ciencia-ficción, inquietante y de un profundo pesimismo. Shirakawa, un perfecto desconocido para mí (y me da la impresión de que para Occidente en general) se revela aquí como un maestro del «weird tale», experto en la creación de atmósferas opresivas y desasosegantes, y de llevar a buen puerto una historia que desde el principio se intuye cómo va a acabar, pero que no pierde por ello un ápice de interés. La moraleja final es una auténtica obra maestra: ambigua, terrible y, sin embargo, hermosa. Y el misterio de los platillos, que continúa hasta más allá del final, que no se resuelve, dejándonos con la duda de qué son, de a qué vienen realmente esos misteriosos ¿observadores? del espacio.

Más que recomendable.

[Mariano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Valoro muchísimo los rescates que está haciendo Living de line, pero este siento que vale mas por lo raro que por la obra en sí. La narrativa es muy tosca, no hay una buena construcción de la historia, que está interrumpida todo el tiempo por pequeños textos con floklore sobre los hongos. Los dibujos también son medio duros, es como un Umezz tosco, EXCEPTO... cuando aparecen los zombis hongos. Ahí aparecen unas páginas hermosas, que para mi es lo que vale del libro. Incluso el essay no está muy bueno, prácticamente te hace resumen de obras. Comparado con el de Her Frankenstein se queda muy corto. El volumen mas flojo de la línea Smudge por ahora.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a relentless, creepy and bleak UFO invasion manga from the 1970s. I wasn't expecting it to be as hopeless as it is, especially with the cute artwork. Nothing good happens! It definitely left an impression on me. I have no idea if the Hiroshima metaphor is intentional in this case, but it was hard not to think of it as you flipped through the book to see Japan devastated by "mushrooms" (as in mushroom cloud?) that came from above. Chilling.

[Connor Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun and quick little read. I really enjoyed the mushroom folk tales that were interspersed throughout the main story. This isn't so much a sci-fi as it is a horror manga with mushrooms and the mention of outer space. The author clearly researched mushrooms before writing this (and even has a couple pages devoted to mushrooms from real life) but fails to understand some basic mushroom facts (e.g., that they are the fruiting body of mycelium and do not have "roots")

[DOOM · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is wild. It feels like a b horror/sci-fi movie and I mean that as a compliment. The art is a bit dated and has that older manga style but it works very well with this story and I believe it has aged well. Parasitic mushrooms that takeover humans, need I say more? I really enjoyed the side stories they put in this manga as well; folklore/myths/urban legends about mushrooms. The history about UFOs and some of the sightings and stories were very interesting as well.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating blend of cheesy 70s science fiction and environmental horror, this is told as both manga and an illustrated story in a blend that works surprisingly well. I had no idea Japan had so many tales about evil mushrooms.

[dragonriderjinx · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reads as if Kazuo Umezz drew invasion of the body snatchers, which was p cool! There were a few inconsistencies that bothered me and the translation wasn’t done very well, but overall v entertaining!

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun vintage scifi manga to keep you company on a night when you can’t sleep, and pretty perfect for the spooky season.

[S Ó B · Rating 4 out of 5]

exactly my thing; weirdly informative, campy, excessively bleak

[Sadie Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has that Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell feeling. Like its built directly from the bones of my childhood fears and obsession. A rare perfect cult object.

[Alex Fyffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

Did not expect to love this one as much as I did. Campy, existential fun. More great work from translator and obscure manga archaeologist Ryan Holmberg. The last 50 pages are kind of amazing.

[AllyP Reads Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable book. I liked the weird mushroom stories interspersed throughout. The story ends pretty chillingly though, and I think it's perfectly believable this could happen in real life.

[Leah Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know how much i would enjoy this vintage spore-horror. the illustrations of the mushroom zombies was inspiring! the dialog of the kid and his teacher was halarious. great dark story.