Gyo: The Death Stench Creeps 2-in-1 Deluxe Edition

I found this today whilst I festered at Barnes and Noble. It was enjoyable enough. It was definitely twisted. I've read a few other things by this writer, and this is probably the closest to Splat that I've seen him create. Essentially, we follow are intrepid hero and his annoying girlfriend from a vacation in Okinawa through to an apocalypse inadvertently created by the Japanese military seventy years in the making. As Tadashi and Kaori are lolling around and arguing because she's kind of awful, they smell a nasty smell and discover that–lo!–fish bodies have mysteriously come to have mechanical spider legs attached to them. The fish creatures take over Okinawa and then, after our awful couple has returned to mainland Japan, the horror follows them. When the fish bodies rot, people become the next targets of the weird mechanical legs. Because a weird ‘germ' is passed from the fish to all other creatures. This germ causes people to become covered in boils and then become swollen with gas, which the mechanical legs need to run. There are a ton of gas clouds in this, which should be funny, but it isn't, because gas clouds are usually followed by oral and anal intrusion. Some messed up stuff goes down in this. The art is great. Not much blood, but it's still gruesome and disturbing, and Ito-sensei's line art is trippy and weird and unnerving. It's wonderfully Lovecraftian in parts.

My main quibble is that the two female characters are both terrible. Kaori is just a bitcah from the get-go. And Tadashi's uncle's assistant is just a damsel in distress. Neither of them are strong characters; they just exist for the men to act upon.

Still, it was an entertaining read. I'd recommend it for horror fans.