Gyo volume #2: the deeper vileness
It’s been a short but gleefully twisted journey, this - Gyo has in turns been sickening, cheesy, funny and imaginative but with some genuine scares along the way. No matter how serious the plight of our hapless hero was, I still couldn’t take the whole thing entirely seriously: everything from the concept to the execution shows an intuitive knowledge on the part of the author in regards to what makes for a good horror tale but it seems to keep its tongue firmly in cheek.
The second volume got off to a bit of a faltering start with a large jump forward in the timeline, which threw the continuity a bit; I would have liked to have seen the situation progressively worsen, especially with Ito’s striking and detailed art style. It turns out that even after falling unconscious in a pit of dead sea life, Tadashi is even more intent on finding poor Kaori, who is infected with the deadly disease. At this point I ought to give a fuller synopsis but if I outlined cows with mechanical legs, a Death Stench Circus and an airship that runs on pure stink, you’d think I was making it up, right? Truth be told, I couldn’t even begin to come up with half the stuff that Ito does - he’s not afraid to put his characters through extremely unpleasant experiences either. Take for example the Death Stench machines that run on the gas: they draw it from BOTH ENDS of the the victims, which is some sight to behold, I can assure you.
“Fearless wretch/Insanity/He watches/Lurking beneath the sea…”
