If you enjoy Junji Ito as an ideas man and a visionary, Black Paradox will appeal to you. If your tastes lean more towards The Twilight Zone than The Human Centipede, you’ll enjoy Black Paradox. But you want a cohesive, effective story, Black Paradox comes up a little short.

After his recent forays into non-horror (Cat Diary, The Patriot Rasputin, even parts of New Voices in the Dark), it’s easy to suspect that Junji is getting bored drawing vampire bats and stitched-together corpses. That trend is continued by Black Paradox. Next to the lurching sickness of Gyo, the Mach 10 sci fi carnage of Hellstar Remina, and the gruesome Lovecraftian hellfuck of Uzumaki, Black Paradox dials the intensity way, way down.

Still, maybe that’s not bad. A new, less campy Junji Ito, relying on weirdness and surreality and psychological scares…sounds like we have a date! So what goes wrong?

Basically, Black Paradox showcases a chaotic, out-of-control, self-indulgent plot. Ito has a complete inability to develop any of his own ideas properly.

This manga is the story of four troubled people who have formed a suicide pact, and their adventures in and beyond this world. The first chapter is a horrific traffic collision of various random horror tropes (dopplegangers, evil robots, haunted mirrors…). It’s like Junji had ten ideas for a story and tried to write them all at once. If I was one of these people I’d kill myself just to make my life simpler.

Starting from chapter 2, things get a bit more coherent. One of the characters swallows some sleeping pills, is revived after a near-death experience, and grows a portal to another world in his lower stomach (or something). The other world is full of beautiful gemstones, and the other characters put their suicide plans on hold to harvest, sell and market the stones. But things soon get out of hand when it’s discovered that the stones are extremely dangerous, and the suicide group must go into hiding when they’re suspected of distributing terrorist weapons.

To enjoy Black Paradox’s story you basically can’t think at all about what you’re reading. There’s any number of things that just don’t make sense (that character who is chained to a bed for a month against her will…why? What did she do?) and sometimes Junji breaks his own rules (other characters start developing portals, even though they never swallowed sleeping pills).

I did think the characters were better than in most Junji Ito stories. Marisol is boring manga heroine #1428905 …but then we have the scheming, double-timing Doctor Suka and the morose, byronic Piitan.

There’s a really solid set of ideas powering Black Paradox, and the final chapter does earn its desired emotional response. I enjoyed the allegorical riffs on how willingly humans will screw themselves for short-term comforts. But the central thematic material is put to such bizarre, senseless use in Black Paradox. It’s like having strong, sturdy wooden boxes that you use to catalogue your booger collection.

Black Paradox also contains two bonus stories. “The Licking Woman” is a nice piece of mayhem, featuring demon-possessed tongues and plot holes, and “The Mystery Pavilion” is so short it doesn’t even have an opportunity to suck.

Tucker Max retired from his lifestyle, and gave us this final book of adventures as a parting gift.

Sloppy Seconds collects all the Tucker Max “backwash”, all the little bits and pieces that weren’t good enough for the first three Tucker Max books. You’ll recognise some stories from his site. Others have already appeared in other books. As for the rest…well, Tucker himself admits that the signal to noise ratio is a bit spotty. Obviously these stories were left out of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell et al for a reason.

Still, I had fun. Unlike the women in the stories.

The Great:

— The Duke Campout story…this is amazing, one of the best things he’s written. Favourine line: “She was the type who would cockblock endangered pandas at the zoo.”

— The buttsex story, an old classic. Tucker gets a girl to agree to anal sex, and he tries to covertly film it for posterity (posteriority?). This comes from Tucker’s early twenties, when he claims he was perhaps the worst person in the world.

— The Slingblade movie reviews. Holy shit, these were funny. I need a whole book of them.

— “Fuck the fucking headboard”… this one killed me. Tucker is railing some chick on a cheap hotel bed, she breaks off the headboard by accident, and she won’t stop obsessing about it. I feel like I’m being given a crash course in female psychology.

— A fair few “sexting” stories. Some of them are funny…

The Okay

— …some of them just go on too long and overstay their welcome. Tucker goes for surreal Kaufmanesque humour, with mixed results. By the end I was thinking “thanks, I get the point, let’s move on.”

— Some stories from Tucker’s childhood are found here. Not always funny, but they are interesting. He has never spoken much about his childhood except to say that it sucked so this is a side to Tucker you don’t often see.

— The Junior stories. Junior was one of the more memorable characters from IHTSBIH, along with Slingblade, and here he gets some more prime time in the spotlight. “Junior’s Marriage” was just…woah…

The Retarded

— A detailed description of how Tucker learned to masturbate.

— Some completely unfunny stories that amount to “I’m getting a blowjob while writing this”

— No, Tucker, I don’t care about your dog.

Sloppy Seconds is definitely a fun collection of some rare and hard to find Tucker Max material. It’s value is a little questionable as the two big stories, Campout and Buttsex, have already been published (and are still available for free on Tucker’s site.) Definitely something to get once you own I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Assholes Finish First, and Hilarity Ensues.

When you’re 12 years old, you read things like Hideshi Hino and think it’s the coolest thing ever.

You don’t stay 12 forever.

I would describe Hino as gory spooky-themed kiddie manga, heavily influenced by western comics in both story and aesthetic, with a weird art style (and not in a good way), and a strong imagination. The Collection is a heavily “enhanced” biography of Hino’s, presented as a series of short comics about all the sick shit his mother, father, brother, grandfather, etc do.

Between each episode we have Hino himself providing commentary (a framing device similar to EC Comics’ Crypt Keeper…Hino’s from Japan, but his muse lives on the other side of the Pacific!), and the stories themselves are just plain bizarre. The most memorable sequence in The Collection stars comic-Hino’s grandfather fighting a sword battle against an evil sentient tumor that’s attached to his own body.

If you’re looking for something more than wacky gross-outs — anything more — you will not find it. The stories are like bare threads connecting one gory bloodbath to another. The blaring one-note characters are not sympathetic or interesting. Hino’s Klasky-Csupo approach to art cuts the legs out from anything resembling atmosphere or scariness. Violence aside, The Collection seems like something written for children.

No, it’s worse than that. Kazuo Umezu’s “The Drifting Classroom” was written for children. By volume three I was engrossed in an amazing post-apocalyptic survival story and I didn’t care. The Collection is a series of bloody jokes. The first couple of pages involve a woman driving down a road at night. Who is she? Where’s she going? These are questions another mangaka might have asked (and found entertaining answers to), but Hino doesn’t care. He just skips right to the part where she dies horribly.

It’s cliche to refer to something as a joke with no punch-line. Hideshi Hino’s The Collection is actually the reverse…all punch-lines and no jokes. It’s a series of boom-boom-boom climaxes with scant substance to give them context and meaning.