Note that I originally wrote this review for Kaiju and Henshin Manga, a manga Facebook group covering one of my favorite genres. I lightly edited it for publishing here, but the content is almost the same.
Usually giant monsters in Japan tend to be pretty kid-friendly, and while Ultraman has his occasional very bloody moments ripping and cutting kaiju apart, and Gamera might douse the camera with brightly colored blood on occasion, nevertheless the mood is usually kept light and airy without much real fear. Shingo Honda’s manga Creature! changes all that with a heavy dose of gross-out freaky horror and massive, wicked-looking Lovecraftian monstrosities.
The story: Highschooler Akira Takashiro is trying to up his game in basketball and overcome his rival for love interest Miku, who goes to a different school. But just as he gets drafted into playing in the next basketball match, what seems a massive earthquake shakes up the school, and suddenly hideous tentacled monsters are ripping and slicing his classmates to pieces. He manages to escape with the class president in tow, then teams up with a nerd and a punk, but the outside world is no safer than inside, as the city teems with a menagerie of toothy, massive creatures with a thirst for human flesh. Can Akira survive and reunite with his lost love at the station? Will the earth remain under the dominance of humankind? Where did these monsters come from?
We don’t get all the answers in the first volume, but we do get a fast-paced and deliriously gory story. The Japanese title is “Hakaijuu,” which I have heard combines the Japanese word for “monster” with the verb for “to vomit,” so it isn’t surprising that we get a lot of guts and gore—one of the most shocking moments being a scene in which we peek into a giant monster’s mouth to see Akira’s classmates melting in digestive juices. The monster designs themselves are varied and sport endless tentacles, teeth, and eyes in all the wrong places, but for a monster buff like myself, I really enjoyed seeing their insane countenances and abilities, and especially the destruction left in their wake as they preyed upon the kid protagonists and battled each other for supremacy. Character motivations are somewhat basic, which doesn’t mean bad, but still… Akira and his friends sometimes feel like archetypes more than individuals. They still are at least sharply delineated from each other, and I know from reading the first 17 or so volumes that some of them will eventually go through major character arcs, but they aren’t really allowed to piece together much of a personality or backstory before they are up and running away from the monsters.
A note on the translation, since I have read both the original Japanese and the English version of the first volume: The dialogue can be a bit wooden in the English sometimes, but it wasn’t enough to detract so much from my enjoyment. Also, I was disappointed that the English version didn’t include Shingo’s little notes to readers that appear at the beginning of each volume. He talks in one of them about how disappointed his father was that he was doing THAT kind of manga!
For me, despite some flaws, the sometimes pedestrian plot is enough of a justification for mad monster mayhem, at least for starters, and Honda’s artwork is fantastically detailed. When the big monsters appear, too. the creatures an impressive sense of scale and sheer awesomeness. While the first book kind of feels like a zombie apocalypse with the zombies replaced by toothy giant monsters, nevertheless I think the story fills an important niche in giant monster fiction that had gone relatively untouched before Attack on Titan came along—and Creature! is much more extreme in violence compared to its hairy younger monster sibling. If you have the tolerance for the blood and gore, Honda’s manga is stupid entertainment worthy at least of a nibble and a bite.
