These type of stories are interesting to me given the current climate around the world. In that way it is cousin to some of the more violent short stories of Inio Asano. To communicate to a world that ignores them at best, horrifies them at most–a kind of insane pain.

The despairing to matter, to not be the victim, to not be weak. There is a despair behind Konosuke Mori and Luna Miyawaki in Laughing Vampire. We see this similar morality at play in Harmony Korine’s recent Spring Breakers–where the girls in the film are able to assert their agency and humanity through violence they learned from videogames and rap videos. To be able to inflict violence and death is to feel strong and superior. With the latter being the celebrated hero. The realization that there is only horror, and a view of a world of those who have violence done to them, and those who do violence. A nihilism born in defeat and concession. It is about the cultural nihilism that has to take root in response to that kind of cataclysm. Maruo’s Laughing Vampire comes from the other side of that. With post-modernism it was as if we could no longer see things as a totality anymore–but instead saw them fragmented across an endless desert of horrors from which we had to create a distance.

Modernism died, and Post-modernism took root. But the psychic toll of having the power to vaporize so many lives in an instant was immediately apparent in our arts.

In the west, the typical justification for the bomb was that it saved innumerable lives that would have been lost in an invasion. The horror of that level of destruction affirms a completely different kind of thinking which is the seed from which The Laughing Vampire positions itself. The Laughing Vampire comes out of the ashes and horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This structure is inverted in Suehiro Maruo’s The Laughing Vampire. The pursuit of good as a truism, without a deeper questioning of the merits of that pursuit. Uzumaki in many ways affirms traditional values of good and evil, and positions good over evil. The virginal good trying to avoid being marked by the evil that is flooding all around her until she is able to either escape or get turned into a pillar of salt. Kyrie of Uzumaki is a traditional horror heroine. In Junji Ito’s Uzumaki( which I wrote about here) the community is positioned as an insane evil which orbits a protagonist who tries to do good. Suehiro Maruo’s The Laughing Vampire and the Aesthetics of Horror in Comics

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