Nov 19, 2024
PTSD Radio – Spoiler Free – Mixed Feelings
TLDR
Overall: 4/10
Disclaimer: due to the nature of this work – a collection of short stories –, my normal parameters of Story, Art, Characters and Enjoyment with a weighted average won’t be applied. Instead, a global overview will be offered.
PTSD Radio is but an excuse to draw creepy panels, as it lacks much of anything of horror.
PTSD Radio is a one-of-a-kind manga by Masaaki Nakayama. It is a compilation of short stories that are weakly connected by a common thread. The story, in general, is not coherent and does not make much sense as a whole, even though there
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are some attempts to connect the dispersed dots. The stories are incredibly short – mostly being 5-10 pages long – making any short story lacking in development in all senses. They look like ideas for certain panels rather than stories.
Designed as a horror manga, it features many elements of the genre, such as creepy panels that play with the uncanny valley effect, jumpscares, and an eerie atmosphere. However, it is extremely lacking in all other aspects: it is not scary, the jumpscares are foreseeable, and everything looks like a failed attempt to emulate Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.
One of the good things about the manga is the art, though. The art is of great quality and is the saving grace in all this. There are eerie panels – but not scary – that are truly memorable. There are also ideas in some stories that are worth developing for their horror value.
PTSD Radio simply doesn’t have characters. There are entities that participate in the story, more like figurines, but there aren’t any individual characters per se – entities with personalities, a name, and a sense of morals (or lack thereof) that play a genuine specific role in a story.
The author also claims that strange things started to happen to him when he began the serialisation of the manga, which helped to add another dimension of horror to the manga. Blurring the line between fiction and reality was also the great trump card in PTSD Radio, as some – I repeat, some – of the things that supposedly happened to the author are way scarier than the actual stories of the manga.
At six volumes and 97 chapters at the time of the review, it is nevertheless a quick read since there isn’t a lot of dialogue, and most of the stories are but visual experiences. It cannot, however, be recommended: aside from the visuals, PTSD Radio isn’t scary and does not add to the overall horror genre. For this reason, it deserves a mixed feelings stamp dangerously close to a not recommended.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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