The Laughing Vampire Review

Since I was 15 I turned into a big comic book afficionado, back them I read mostly Vertigo and other stuff in the same line, I didn’t have much interest in super hero comics and still do to this day after reading a bunch of them, but manga in the other hand I never really got into until I was 18, 19 that had a change of view towards the manga medium, I thought it was mostly shounen crap, but I had some points of entry that made me see that was something much more interesting there them I thought, The Laughing Vampire is one of this point of entry. It’s unique and there is nothing like it out there, and still there isn’t !! I don’t remember what exactly made me read this, I properly saw something on tumblr of it and decide search out and see what it was, I had a blog on tumblr where I use to post bits from Comic that read and like, for all the crap that website is it did help open my views on comics and arts in general. Recently here in Brasil, the first volume of this comic got released, much anticipated by me of course, so I wanted to write about it, because this is something that gets barely any attention and it’s author Suehiro Maruo. After reading this years ago I got interest in the works of Suehiro Maruo and read most of what I could find of it, he is a Ero-Guro artist so most of his work deals on the erotic and grotestic, so sex and gore, lots of gore and eye licking, there is something that is prominent in his work, but there is sort of poetry behind it, that a way I would describe his style, it’s like visual poetry, I mean you look at some of his illustrations and they are so awestrucking, and his narrative is much more visual. I was gonna mention that this was his first long form work, because most of his work prior to this was in short form stories, but he does have a long work before the Laughing Vampire, it’s Shoujo Tsubaki, that even have an animated adaptation that I never saw, it’s not as good as Vampire but you can see a lot of his own personal topics that he likes to explore, the Circus is a elements that prominent in his work, people with deformities, the period during the American bombing of japan is one of his background for most of his story, that all show up in Vampire as well, the point I wanted to make is that Vampire was the commination of all his works up to this point. 

The Laughing Vampire story follows three Characters, Konosuke who is turned into a Vampire in the very first pages, Luna who is a normal school girl and Sotoo who is another average school boy, but at night goes around setting buildings on fire. And they are the character that the story focus on, I think that you could say that Luna is more of the protagonist of this story since most of it focus on her, and she seems like the only good moral person that we see in this story, every other student that we see is already corrupt, we are introduced to her as college of hers that take her along their extra curricular activities that are taking care of the elderly, but in fact these girls are doing sexual for them for money and when she see that she run away in disgust, but we don’t see much of Konosuke prior his transformation, so we have no idea of what kinda person he was before he turned into a Vampire, good or bad like the others, he is attracted by this hag that turns him into a vampire on a whim it seems, like it second nature for her do to it, and Konosuke when he turns he immeatiately is hitted with this hunger for blood, he kill this girl and drinks her blood and even after that he tries to resist this hunger, but he does it again, and again to the point that he turns into a complete monster, not only that but he enjoys it, eveytime he drinks blood he has this exctasis that is describe as a flower blooming in his brain. But different from them is Sotoo who is introduced setting fire a journal box and that grows to set fire into the building, and he also have this obsession over it, he get his ecstasy in his acts of evil and profanity, he comes across this murder scene of a woman in a bathroom and he takes her dissipated finger and use to masturbate later, his character is already enveloped by evil, different than Konosuke that is seduced by evil and Luna who is surrounded by evil and its rejecting it, but by the end she surrender to it. I don’t wanna get into details into the story to not spoil it, but that the general premise in my view, that evil does not corrupt people, but it grows in them and turns them into monsters.