It’s not exactly encouraging to see the boxset for a 3 volume horror manga called “Pygmalion”… having on the back cover a pig amusement park mascotte drenched in blood.
(yeah, i bought this on a whim without doing any research while visiting my local comic book shop)
Not random per sé, as the story IS about a rampage by mascottes during the National Mascotte Festival in Japan, after a series of weird announcements that trigger the suited creatures to go on a massacre, and Keigo is separated in the following chaos from his younger brother Makoto…
Still, i feel a refresher about the myth of Pygmalion is needed, just in case.
The king of Cyprus, , to spite the rampant female prostitution going on in the city, he decides the usual Greek level of mysoginy wouldn’t cut it this time, so he decided to create the perfect woman… by sculpting it out of clay. As he genuinely fell in love with his creation, enough to lay in bed with it (hoping one day it would become alive, which means Pinocchio is also kinda sort of a Pygmalion story) and believe it to be the perfect expression of feminity, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, during one of the rites devoted to her, concede to the sculptor’s plea to make the statue (unamed in the myth but post-humously dubbed Galatea) a living, breathing human, so they could marry.
From the sculptor and Galatea’s union was Pafos, her name later given to the eponymous city in Cyprus where there stood a temple dedicated to Aphrodite’s worship.
to cite an example within the horror space, there are not many direct adaptations, but there’s definitely plenty of adjacent works, like Frankenhooker, which is also directly derivative of Bride Of Frankenstein, because again, myths are told and retold over and over again, inspiring others stories that crib some elements from them to a certain extent.
Actually, in a way that refresher wasn’t needed, because the first chapter laids out the myth in a concise and precise fashion, but i prefer my synopsis, so whateves.
The story reminds me more of one about animal park mascottes being actual people-animal hybrids in Franken Fran, but it’s a bit more intricated, as the myth of Pigmalyon thrown in gives us these feral, self-regenerating “living statues” borne out of a secret scientific experiment backed by the government and led by a cabal of the world’s most renowned scientists, which also involves the main protagonist, Keigo, and his little brother, Makoto.
There is a bit more but that’s basically it and it’s pretty predictable horror-sci fi tropes all around, but the main villain isn’t bad, has some solid motivations, the true villain is decent as well, all things considered, though the ending it’s a bit too positive, at least for my taste, and it feels rushed.
Then again, the shonen-esque structure, it being a tale of brotherhood and revenge, and just 3 volumes make it a bit too brief to properly develop these characters (these being the aforementioned “all thing considered”), whom all remain adequate but nothing to write home about in any depth, because there simply isn’t much to them or the themes.
There are some nice monster designs, but most are pretty predictable juxtapositions of mascotte cute & gore, which is what one would expected, but i dunno, the creature design leaves something to be desired, heck, the aforementioned chapter of Franken Fran had better “mascotte flesh suits” designs in itself, here some are really throwaway generic “blobs of stuff” designs, some “my first horror manga” stuff… which makes sense, since this is Chihiro Watanabe’s debut manga. I do like the “legally distinct Sanrio characters” like the painter elephant.
It’s alright, feels a bit of a waste of the idea of adapting the Pygmalion myth into horror, there’s so much it could have been made with the idea, but for what it is, i think Chihiro Watanabe’s Pygmalion to be honestly okay, it’s competently made on a technical level too, it delivers on the spectacle of the splatter und gore with plenty body horror and graphic content (including a pig mascotte fucking women, gotta earn that 18+ rating somehow), it’s decent for a debut opus by the creator, whom was actually an assistant for My Hero Academia’s author, Kohei Horikoshi.
With that said, it’s not surprising he also did Haburi in 2018, a supernatural horror battle shounen manga about the titular “Haburi”, a caste of mystical warriors-ninjas tasked to rid the world of zombie-esque incarnations of evil spirits that are far beyond any redemption.
Might check it out, since it’s also a short series (4 volumes this time) and the publisher for Italy (and maybe some other European countries), Mangasenpai – via their Manga Sensei branch -, also did collect the volumes in a nice little boxset.
Wise Cafe (International) 