Octopus Girl Vol. #01 of 4*
Job interview
The inside covers feature a smattering of dull flowers against a black background, with the back cover featuring creepy renditions of Takako and Sakae's faces. The title page and table of contents are without illustration, but each chapter opener features a rather provocative illustration. There are three chapters that end on an odd page and the extra page always features a new illustration, all of which are extremely bizarre. There are four pages of 4-panel comics at the back of the book, as well as a four page mini comic, a page dedicated to Toru Yamazaki's photo album, and the last page featuring something of an author's talk. I was really pleased with the amount of extras in this volume, and the volume ends with the comic, so there's no ads or anything like that in the back.
Text/Translation:
I was actually quite impressed with the translation here. This is an extremely bizarre series with a fair number of quirks and cultural references, and it reads extremely well in English. I'd be lying if I said I never got lost, but I think that's just the nature of this title. There were no grammar or spelling errors either, which I also appreciated. The sound effects are left in Japanese, with an English translation alongside them matching them stylistically.
Artwork:
As I said earlier, this volume shocked and surprised me. I expected a gristly horror comic, and while this series delivers on the gore moreso than almost any of the other Dark Horse horror titles, it does so in the most humorous way possible. He shifts between two or three different ways of drawing throughout the volume. His usual style is pretty clean and very cutesy, with lots of round corners and flowers and whatnot, then there's an ultra-cute style which gets played up whenever Takako is trying to please and also towards the end when we get a shoujo manga chapter. The other style is also used fairly frequently, and that's the sort of grotesque horror style. Any scene with Sakae is inevitably drawn in this style, because I think it's hard to make her look cute with her moray eel teeth and her hairy mole. But there's also plenty of other opportunities for gore, as Takako and others will take every opportunity to slice and dice. The contrast between the cutesy style and the gore is quite shocking, and I think is a large part on why this series struck me as so bizarre. It helps that the story reinforces it, but the art's extremely complimentary to what's going on. I love the style, I love the character designs, and I love the little flourishes that frequently found their ways in, such as Sakae's mole hair, gross folded skin on many characters, weird faces, textured vomit, and fluids that frequently flew out of noses. There's a lot of character to his style, and I'd love to see how another series works as well as Octopus Girl using the same sort of art.
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