"Basically, it’s a question of how many variations of stories I can come up with that revolve around shit and sex."
—Shintaro Kago, Vice Magazine
Shintaro Kago (born 1969) is a Japanese absurdist manga artist. While his works fall under the Guro genre, they are far less sexualized than that of his contemporaries, instead focusing on screwing with the heads of the readership. They also full of nonsensical humour, toilet jokes and general Black Comedy. With emphasis on nonsensical and black.
It should go without saying that just about everything he's done is Not Safe for Work. Or stomachs.
Partial bibliography:
- Abstraction
- An Inquiry Concerning A Mechanistic Worldview of the Pituitary Gland
- Blow Up
- Closed Hospital - A hospital secedes from Japan, becoming a nation whose caste structure is based on what injuries or illnesses a person has.
- The Collection
- Dance! Kremlin Palace - The Theme Park Version of Russia, to be precise, a Circus of Fear version.
- Drafting A Water Goddess - Women are murdered and their bloated corpses are made into boats and raced down a river.
- Everything's Peaceful
- Fetus Collection
- Hara Kiri
- Head Prolapse Elegy - A story about a penanggalan, a Southeast Asian vampire who can separate her head and internal organs from her body and fly around and the difficulties this causes for her sex life.
- Labyrinth
- Multiplication - A sentient comic strip splits into different branches of panels, showing the varying ways that the events of a story could turn out. As more and more splits are made, the story becomes increasingly corrupted and nonsensical.
- Paranoia Street
- Punctures
- Springs - People take to surgically implanting bionic springs in their bodies that sometimes malfunction, with bloody results.
- Super-Conductive Brains Parataxis - This is a non-guro, Science Fiction manga that was serialized in Weekly Young Jump.
- Superglue
- The Big Funeral
- Slippery Cross-Section - A satellite laser slices a girl in half vertically, and she doesn't notice until both of her halves start to slide apart. She then struggles, unsuccessfully, to hold herself together while seeking help.
- Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere — The WWII-era Imperial Japan-themed manga largely using the same Circus of Fear approach as Dance! Kremlin Palace.
He has also published several Web Videos on YouTube. Being on YouTube they are SFW, but no less weird.
Tropes common to his work include:
- Artifact of Doom - The clock in his Web Video Revenge of the Clock.
- Bizarrchitecture
- Body Horror - Most of his works usually contain this.
- The Collector - The subject of The Collection.
- Glorious Mother Russia - For some strange reason, Kago wrote some comics taking place in the Soviet Union. Stereotypes abound.
- Guro
- Hollywood Thin: One of his slightly more SFW manga plays with this. In the manga, being rail-thin is a thing seen as absolute beauty; to the extent that young girls are willing to remove their intestines just to get that tiny bit thinner. Then they start lasooing each other with them.
- I Just Write the Thing: Seems to be the message of Multiplication—Kago just can't help but spiral into Gorn, even when he wants to write normal hentai.
- Mind Screw
- My Skull Runneth Over: The trope image
- No Ending: Quite a few of his works. "Slippery Cross Section" ends with the bisected girl caught on the chain holding her together, begging not to die, to name one.
- No Fourth Wall: "Multiplication" proposes that manga are pictures taken of sentient human body parts of varying size and completeness, posing on shelves, acting out their "roles". They even screw and/or kill each other to complete it. Another manga explores the lives of people with a disease called "Panelithis" which cause the (manga) panels that they appeared in to follow them every where they go, revealing all their dirty secrets to the world.
- Planet of Hats - taken to extremes for absurd comedy.
- Stalker Shrine - The titular Collection.
- Surreal Horror
- Often overlaps with Surreal Humor.
- Yandere - The main character of The Collection.
- Your Head Asplode
- If you came to one of his exhibitions, you could actually have him draw YOUR head asplode.
