Parasyte Full Color Collection 1

Another popular manga series, this time in a deluxe colored version. Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte was originally serialized from 1989 to 1994, when it appeared in black-and-white. Having success (over 25 million copies in circulation by 2022), it would later go on to spawn some spin-offs and be made into a TV series and some films.

As you probably know, I’m not the world’s biggest manga fan, and Parasyte shares some of the main faults that characterize the form, at least for me. The two I’d highlight are (1) the lazy artwork, with indecipherable fight scenes, generic figure, and characters who somehow fail to register any emotion at all on their faces even when supposedly experiencing incredible shocks, and (2) the odd blend of violence and gore with leering, juvenile sexual elements.

But even with those strikes against it I enjoyed Parasyte. It’s has a good basic story, with alien spores falling to Earth, where they immediately crawl inside the brains of other, host life forms. One of them tries to get into the brain of highschool student Shinichi Izumi but he stops it and it can only inhabit his right hand. He calls it “Migi” (Japanese for “right”), and they share a consciousness and talk to each other so that Migi is able to explain to Shinichi what is going on. Migi also has special alien powers that allow him to fight with other aliens. This is important as the aliens can sense each other and they’re not happy that Migi and Shinichi form a human-alien hybrid. And these aliens are very dangerous, as they have the ability to split open and unwind in fantastic ways that allows them to tear humans apart and eat them. This leads the newspapers to be full of reports of the “mincemeat murders,” because that’s all that’s left of people once the aliens are done with them.

What I liked about Parasyte is that it avoids the usual manga trap of just repeating the same situations over and over, with the hero taking on progressively more powerful bad guys. The story is more complicated than that, with a number of interesting pieces that introduce some real drama, like Shinichi’s relationship with his parents, a would-be girlfriend, and a sexy teacher who is an alien. There are also allegorical and political messages in play, from the way Shinichi’s battle with Migi’s impulses stands in for anxiety over masturbation to the environmental angle that, in this first volume at least, is only hinted at.

The upshot being that this is a manga that I actually want to continue reading. High praise!

Graphicalex