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I ordered this manga as a physical copy, directly from its English publisher, Fakku, because I wanted to own a physical copy of a yuri hentai manga, and this was my only choice. Apparently, Fakku was so busy shilling aggressively for Shindol and trying to make the ahegao face a huge trend that they forgot to actually publish a single 18+ manga, out of the thousands on their site, that doesn't feature any penises, until this one. So, yeah, if I could get an eromanga by someone like Homura Subaru or even Mira in print, I would have gotten any of those, but instead I ... got this collection of short vignettes of cute girls having mostly super vanilla sex with each other. It was fine. I will say the printing was very nice, and like I said, I'm glad to get to put an actual yuri eromanga on my shelf, but as a manga I can't say I'm super impressed. The problem is, for a book with 9 separate stories, there's just no diversity here. And I don't mean in terms of sexual content or kinks--I'm actually fine and in fact very happy that it stays super cute and vanilla. I mean in terms of couples, and even just how the girls themselves look. The artist draws fairly detailed and cute--though interestingly rough-looking--images, but their character designs have a bad case of sameface that leads to different characters in different stories rather annoyingly looking exactly the same. The stories are also too short to be focused on anything other than the scenarios for the sex, followed by the sex itself, which again would be fine (it is porn, after all), but the problem is most of the scenarios aren't that interesting and most of the girls don't really have any standout traits other than "cute, and maybe sort of a top," or "also cute, and I guess shy?" All the girls in this manga are tiny, feminine, and cute in the exact same way, which gets really boring. This all leads to this book essentially feeling like 9 chapters of the same uninteresting couple just having sex a bunch of times. That is to say: its cute, its hot, but its essentially the most generic yuri you can imagine--exactly what I expected Fakku to publish, come to think about it. So, yeah, if you want some personality with your porn, look up those authors I mentioned above. If you have some extra money lying around and want to own some real, authentic, translated adults-only GL, though, you could do worse. You could pick up their other "yuri" manga, Twin Milfs *vomits*.

Biomega isn't a series that should be read about, its one that should be seen. That's how aesthetically-driven of a comic it is, and how completely idiosyncratic it is as a representation of the mind of its insane author, Tsutomu Nihei. Despite this, however, I'm gonna make something about it that is designed to be read, because its not like I have much of anything else to do. Seriously, though: my first recommendation to anyone wondering whether or not to read Biomega is to look at the pictures, and if you love them, read it. However, even if your mind is blown initially, you may ... still be disappointed in the end if you expect this series to adhere to any normally held standards of quality.

If I had to describe Biomega in one phrase, it would be "a beautiful mess." This has two meanings in my mind. First, its an utter mess of a manga that happens to be very beautiful. Second, and more importantly, though, it is a work that's beauty largely is derived from its messiness. In broad strokes, Biomega's plot is about its initial setting, Earth, destroying itself in an icky, gooey, action-packed apocalypse and being reborn as something else, a new celestial body of confusion, mystery, and beauty, all of which are completely inexplicable and impossible to understand. Yet as a metanarrattive as well, Biomega itself echoes these themes, because its progression as a story in and of itself is one where its initial premise and all included logic are destroyed in an icky, gooey, action-packed cascade of images, and are reborn in the form of an entirely different manga for no real discernible reason. Biomega isn't a story with a beginning, middle, and end; it is more of a continuous downward spiral, where its world, characters, and images become stranger, more confusing, and far more interesting along the way. It starts as an extremely linear action piece, but if you read it expecting it to stay that way, you will be sorely disappointed. If you expect insanity, though, I think you will leave satisfied.

Read the first volume of Biomega, its hard to not compare it with Nihei's first serialized manga and what many consider to be his magnum opus, BLAME(!). Blame also is hardly a typical or fully coherent story, but the presentation of its setting, a massive, solar-system-sized non-euclidean cyber-city built by sinister post-humans and being explored by two silent immortal cyborgs, is at first glance a lot more creative. The City of Blame is meticulously detailed, atmospheric, and inhuman, while the similar city which Biomega starts off in is far smaller, less ambitious, less well-drawn, and still inhabited by humans. At its outset, Biomega is a serviceable zombie apocalypse story set in this city, with its only major distinguishing feature being its ambitious and technically proficient action scenes, which are far better than the often difficult to follow fights in Blame. Other than that, Biomega seems pretty boring in comparison to Nihei's previous resume, and this, I think, is what leads a lot of people to drop it, and which has led Biomega to rarely be included in discussion of Nihei's best works because of this.

Keep reading, though, you'll find that Nihei himself agreed. After a change in magazines following the release of volume 1, which included a shift from weekly to monthly publication and a commensurate skyrocketing of art quality, Biomega becomes a different beast entirely, grotesquely morphing into some of the most balls-to-the-wall action insanity in the medium of manga as a whole. No longer is the main conflict a zombie outbreak caused by some vaguely Umbrella-like corporation, but instead it becomes a plot to turn...the world into...biological goo(?) so it can be reborn...or something, orchestrated by immortal psychic cyborgs battling each other from imposing cyberpunk monoliths that loom over the surface of the increasingly disfigured planet once known as Earth. There's eygasmically deformed monsters, brilliantly-paneled fights, and an utterly epic battle featuring the main characters riding a super-motorcycle vertically up the exterior of a space elevator while fighting off a plantlike stalk of flesh emerging from the planet hundreds of miles below. This is in volume 4 out of 6. The earth is destroyed, there's a bunch of shit that makes the Akira movie seem coherent by comparison, and then you're left wondering how the rest of the series could possibly end. Well...

The last two volumes take place in a different setting where everything looks different and where thousands of years have passed without our protagonist's knowledge. What started as a cyberpunk action romp becomes a high fantasy epic set on a string-shaped world whose scenery looks like if Nihei's, HR Giger's, and Yoshitaka Amano's artstyles all fucked and had a premature harlequin baby. Random, bizarre new characters are introduced, about 20 Vaati videos worth of lore are hinted at and dismissed, and literally thousands of years pass, all in the span of TWO SHORT VOLUMES. Its mind altering. For some it could be maddening. Yet somehow, in the upside-down universe Nihei has taken us to, it almost works. In a way, Biomega represents everything that I love about what Nihei, and manga in general, is capable of. Because its all possible only through Nihei's incredible visual creativity and technical mastery. In Biomega, the unpolished architectural brilliance of Blame and the sketchy darkness of its own early chapters give way to some of the richest, smoothest, most detailed, and most simultaneously transcendent and disturbing black-and-white art I've ever seen. Composition is masterful, action paneling flows effortlessly, and every page contains new, unearthly visual delights.

The middle section of the series is completely unhinged action, but the final two volumes, as borderline incoherent as they are, contain so many unorganized fantasy ideas that they seem practically bursting at the seams with Newtype-level psychic creativity. The barriers between flesh and metal, between artbook and comic, between brain and body, between bad storytelling and alien genius begin to disturbingly melt unto each other, eroding into hyper-detailed manga goop more and more with each turn of the page. This manga may seem perfect if you like oddball designs and intense, hyper-violent action, yet it will disappoint you if you want it to be bound to those things exclusively. Biomega is a bizarre aesthetic experience that pushes the boundaries of manga itself in all the right ways and all the wrong ways, all at once, yet push those boundaries it does. And in way, it embodies perfectly one of the most unique aspects of the intensely author-driven medium of manga--the chaotic creativity that comes with a brilliant artist ascribing logic to his flow of aesthetic ideas that fundamentally lacks any. Weirdness, grossness, worldbuilding, artistic prowess, all purely for its own indulgent sake. That's Nihei, that's art, that's manga.

Dead Dead Demons DeDeDeDestruction is the currently running series by Inio Asano, a mangaka who has become the new hotness among pretentious people for the realistic quality of his work and his skill in portraying the depression and alienation of young people, which of course academics love because not only are they all depressed, but also because alienation is a buzzword used about late-stage capitalism or whatever, which is an uplifting term because it implies capitalism will ever end. Anyway, I know all of this from hearsay (and because the other person in the review section who gave this a 9 is one such academic ... who mentions, like, Tolstoy and some other old manga authors no one reads), because I've never read any of Asano's other work. None of that means I don't like this series, though (henceforth referred to as DeDeDeDe, like from Kirby); in fact, I like it a lot, enough to have my profile picture be the main character, and so I'll now proceed to start doing my job and explaining why.

Basically, you can say this series is good because of stuff like the alienation thing that I mentioned, which is true, or you can phrase it like I am and say simply that this manga is an extremely fun slice-of-life comic full of characters that act like people I'm friends with and set in a world that resembles the one I live in like no other I've ever seen in media. I was born in 2001, and am therefore solidly of the zoomer generation, and this manga is the song of my people, capturing the zeitgeist of gen Z to the greatest level of accuracy that I've ever seen in media, and for a slice-of-life story, that is incredibly important because portraying life is what the genre is all about. K-On excels at showing us a picture of a complex and lively group of friends, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou presents nature and the passage of time like no other series, and DeDeDeDe shows us the world as it is without casting judgement or pulling punches.

Teens in first-world countries today, whether said country is Japan, America, Europe, Australia, Korea, China, or wherever else, are coming of age in an absurd world where the difference between irony and sincerity is impossible (and maybe even irrelevant) to distinguish, where the massive amounts of knowledge and media available confuse us as much as they enlighten us, and where the very idea of preparing for the future seems bizarre when all that future holds is global instability, catastrophic climate change, and extreme economic inequality that might very well doom our entire species. Our governments do little, our youth movements are ineffectual, and though people should be banding together, our power structures continue to cast people aside. That's the truth the laughing kids of my--and these characters'--generation hide behind edgy memes and lighthearted complaints, but that looms in the background nonetheless, casting all of our daily lives into its subtle but deadly shadow.

And fittingly enough, even this manga hides the truth behind a metaphor. In DeDeDeDe's Japan, it isn't climate change, but a literal massive shadow that hangs over modern, daily life. A gargantuan, industrial mass of an alien spaceship has been floating in the air for three years by the start of the story, and though little violence happens and its extraterrestrial inhabitants are quite weak, the government fearmongers about them, corporations step in to cash in on weapons to use against them, and psychopathic young men wander around the backstreets to hunt them down. Through all of this, the real problem, that the ship may melt down and doom humans and "invaders" alike, is ignored and suppressed as politicians and billionaires build bunkers to weather the storm. It may seem a bit on the nose when I explain it here, but when it is revealed little by little in the story you realize that the characters are living in a world of endless high alert and military-industrial insanity just like ours.

As I said, though, the series is quite fun for the most part, and even that emulates life. The worst hasn't happened yet, and though realizing these impending disasters makes it harder to relax, it also makes you want to do so more, because its an escape. Though our industrial society may face its ruin, it still provides people with a lot to enjoy, and if there's little you can do, why waste the time you have left? The day-to-day lives of the characters, as well as their personalities and dynamics with each other, are really fun, and also very realistic. The girls banter about stupid things, bring up taboo topics to joke around, make autistic ideological declarations, and ignore the grim truths of the world the same way my friends do. One of my favorite characters, Rin, is a shy cosplayer with a secret Yaoi obsession that she is prodded by another character to admit loudly to her class because "in a surveillance state, our kinks are the only thing they can't take from us!!!" The main character, Kadode, is meant to be a self-insert but her friend, Oran, is utterly unhinged in a believable way, spouting political jargon and obsessing about shooting games and the similar bloodbaths to come because its her only way of coping, and somehow the reality of this only makes it more endearing, an insane feat that this manga somehow manages to pull off.

The artwork is perfect for the tone and themes as well. The characters have cute, distinct, and unrealistically abstracted designs for the most part, and many background characters even look ever so slightly deformed, but there is a down-to-earth quality to their bodies, framing, and implied movement that is difficult to deny, especially when they are shown in Asano's lavishly detailed backgrounds based on an eccentric amalgam of photographic references. The lighting and shading is also weirdly juxtaposed with the characters, again making their goofy designs blend in much better than they should, to the point where even they seem like perfectly natural parts of the setting. Just like the story, the art is an incongruous but resonant clash of tonalities that Asano manages incredibly, to the point where this slice-of-life manga manages to have better dramatic two-page spreads than something like Takehiko Inoe's flatly hyper-technical samurai manga Vagabond.

Slice-of-life fans and people who process the world like I and many other young people do can't miss this one, and the only major complaint that I have to counteract my praise is that DeDeDeDe introduces some characters, specifically in its main cast of girls, that it ends up not spending enough time on, making the characters, though interesting and complex, ultimately not really the driving force of this manga as much as they could have been. The uncomfortable realism of its world, though, and the comfortable resonance that can be found in the interactions of those who somehow still live in it, are really the driving force of this manga. And even the lack of character development is relatable to me, although hopefully you aren't as pathetic as I am.