The laughing vampire
The laughing vampire ( Japanese笑 う 吸血鬼Warau Kyūketsuki ) is an alternative manga by the Japanese illustrator Suehiro Maruo . It can be assigned to the horror genre.
action
Middle school student Konosuke Mori is chosen to be her companion by Rakuda Onna, a 130-year-old demoness. He has to drink her blood and thus becomes a vampire who cannot stand the daylight and has to find new victims at regular intervals to quench his thirst for blood. He feels pleasure and intoxication in his actions and turns completely away from his previous life.
Luna Miyawaki is a classmate who, unlike the other girls, is shy and reserved. She is an outsider trying to defy her burgeoning sexuality. After she was raped, the façade she had kept upright shows cracks, she attacks a classmate and seems to long for death.
During the nightly activities, Konosuke Mori's paths cross with those of Sotoo Henmi, another middle school student. He committed acts of violence that night, which he later entrusted to his diary entitled The Laughing Vampire . One night he overpowers the young Luna, he strangles her with a belt and drinks her blood with the idea of being able to experience an aesthetic scene full of pleasure. However, the taste of the blood is so disgusting that it flees the scene in horror.
Konosuke Mori finds the lifeless body and lets Luna drink its blood. Luna becomes a vampire and his companion. The two kill Luna's rapist and later Henmi before they return to Rakuda Onna with an offering.
style
Suehiro Maruo's drawings are rich in detail and contrast. Its clean and smooth contours are often in stark contrast to the content presented. Severed extremities, blood-stained clothing, hands and faces and insects, from butterflies to worms, are staged precisely and effectively. The young characters show beautiful, very feminine facial features.
Like Hagio Moto in Poe no Ichizoku , Suehiro Maruos uses the subject of vampirism here to depict violence, sexuality and loneliness of the young characters.
Publications
The laughing vampire first appeared in individual chapters from 1998 to 1999 in the Japanese manga magazine Young Champion . The Akita-Shoten publishing house also published these individual chapters in an anthology.
The Berlin comic publisher Reprodukt published the manga in 2003 with an age recommendation from 18 years. Jaqueline Berndt wrote the afterword . The sales of the German translation were not particularly good. The second part, published in Japan in 2004 (ハ ラ イ ソ - 笑 う 吸血鬼 2 Haraiso: Warau Kyūketsuki 2 , Paradise: The Laughing Vampire 2) has not yet appeared in Germany.
literature
- Jaqueline Berndt: Manga for adults: Maruo Suehiros vampyristic nostalgia . In: Stefanie Diekmann / Matthias Schneider (ed.): Scenarios of comics. Heroes and histories in the medium of written imagery . SuKuLTuR, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-937737-88-1 , p. 129-142 .