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Review: ジャガーン 1

ジャガーン 1 ジャガーン 1 by Muneyuki Kaneshiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Blow away your lust for brutality, sex, and carnage!

This manga is not going to be for everyone, but it definitely was for me.

Through some sort of yet unexplained phenomenon, frogs started falling from the sky and infecting discontented people and turning them into "fractured humans", monsters who go on murderous rampages. Enter our main character, a police officer named Jagasaki who is feeling extremely discontented and unfulfilled in life. During an encounter with one of these beasts he accidentally awakens a power within himself that lets him finally have a finger in his inner desires of "shooting 'em up."

The story has these really weird and unsettling vibes that are accentuated ten-fold by the art. The art is really ugly, creepy, and even going on disgusting sometimes, but you can tell that the artist is doing everything very intentionally and has a lot of skill backing them up. I love it.

If you're not a little bit fucked up yourself, I feel like you might not "get" it. If you're saying to yourself, "Yeah, sure, I can deal with some weird stuff," that might not be enough. And I'm telling you this from experience.

I had my friend try reading this, and she thought she could handle it after I told her that it it was horror and weird and had this terribly ugly art style. She could not. It did not vibe with her, she couldn't read it for too long without having to stop.

What I'm trying to say here is: Normies beware.

But for all you other actual fuckheads out there, this is a blast, and you very well might find yourself relating to the main character, or eventually other characters as well.

An immediate criticism you might have of this manga after reading two chapters is that it's literally Parasyte, which is something I also found concerning. But the tone of Jagaaaaaan is so much more unsettling and fucked up that it still feels a bit fresh, even though it does have a lot in common with Parasyte.

A more serious critique I have would be the world building, or rather, lack-there-of. Like, seriously? Frogs? Just randomly falling from the sky one day? Turning people into monsters? How? Why? What? This has obviously got to be explained eventually, but it's still weird as a reader being left to just go along with this absurdity as if it doesn't not make any logical sense at all. Overall this isn't too bad of a problem though, since we're just waiting for the explanation eventually anyway.

Overall good shit.

CAUTION TO POTENTIAL READERS: This manga has explicit depictions of nudity, sex, and gore/murder/exploding bodies/other human and animal tragedies.

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