Shintaro Kago – författare

In 2018, manga artist Shintaro Kago made his English debut with Dementia 21 (Fantagraphics), a collection of absurdist manga short stories. Readers found themselves delighted and disgusted by his penchant for body horror, black comedy and the surreal paired with his emphatic, kinetic art style. Kago returns at the height of his powers with Brain Damage, where he dials up the gore and absurdity to new heights. Brain Damage collects four new short manga stories, a tantalising blend of the hilarious and the macabre. In 'Labyrinth Quartet,' four identical young women trapped in an eerie building must solve the mystery of why they've been gathered there - while being hunted by a knife-wielding stalker. In 'Curse Room,' a plucky health aide is tasked with keeping zombies peaceful, lest they go on a brain-eating rampage. In 'Family Portrait,' people throughout town are strangely disappearing without a trace, and the key to it all is a senile and perverted old man. Finally, in 'Blood Harvest' a series of gruesomely mangled bodies are found in pristine cars - and it appears something sinister lurks within these masses of glass and steel.

Plucky young Yukie Sakai is a home health aide eager to assist her elderly clients. In the first volume of Dementia 21, she got plenty of experience dealing with oddball patients and outre encounters. But now, in volume two, Kago truly lets loose, throwing Yukie into ever more surreal adventures that put her wits to the test! Kago is one of the most inventive and twisted visual artists in manga today. Dementia 21 volume 2 presents him in peak form, with a series of outlandish, eerie, darkly comedic tales that strain the bounds of the imagination.

In Shintaro Kago's vision of history, Genghis Khan's empire was not built by soldiers and warhorses - but rather the animated severed hands of giants! From there, the history escalates at a fever pitch, as the demand for these giant hands sweeps across Asia and Europe and become indispensable for modern life as transportation, labour, power. In time, the hands mutate into other limbs and body parts and are utilised for far more destructive and sinister purposes as the world descends into a hyper capitalist, war hungry hellscape. From the bestselling mangaka of Dementia 21 and Brain Damage comes a vicious satire of humanity's relentless greed infused with the gleeful body horror, visceral detail, and off-the-wall antics that have delighted and disgusted Kago's readers.

Yukie Sakai is a sprightly young home health aide eager to help her elderly clients. But what seems like a straightforward job quickly turns into a series of increasingly surreal and bizarre adventures that put Yukie's wits to the test! Cartoonist Kago, who is well known for combining a more traditional manga style with hyper realistic illustration technique, an experimental visual storytelling approach, and outrageously sexual and scatological subject matter, has single-handedly created his own genre: 'fashionable paranoia.'