Faces that are preternaturally symmetrical, like on a mannequin, are also unsettling. I couldn't give you a reason, but it's something that reaches very deep. By the same token, if you take an image that's stable and balanced and upset that balance even slightly, that can be creepy. Try it and see. You know Hello Kitty, right? Her face is basically a mirror image, left and right. Take one of her eyes, just one of them, and make it 0.1 mm larger. It suddenly looks very weird. Like Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem. What was the genesis of this project, the initial vision? Did you always plan to embed a larger mythos within the story? Ghostly Goals: A girl keeps waking up in the middle of the night, seeing a vague, inhuman mouth panting at her side, exhaling a foul-smelling breath. Despite this, the presence also pulls her from crossing a dangerous road, leaving her confused as to what it is and what it wants. Later, it drags her to the family kitchen just in time to see a fire start and for her father to douse the flames. Then she realizes the mysterious ghost is a dog - the late pet of the former owner. She makes sure his grave will be left untouched and thanks him for the help, now sure it's nothing but helpful. The scariest fiction when you’re an adult is the strange stuff; the type of content that doesn’t make sense that can take average everyday things and make them weird in a moment’s notice. This makes sense of course since the things that scare us as children do exactly the same thing, but as an adult monsters are no longer horrifying mysteries. Enter a new manga from Kodansha Comics called PTSD Radio, which I dove into already confused by the cover and description only to finish reading it perplexed in the best of ways. So what’s it about?

Nov 20 From the U.S. to Japan, You Can Control the Life-Size Moving Gundam from the Comfort of Your Own Home NAKAYAMA: I hadn't heard the expression “jump scare” [an English expression that has no perfect Japanese equivalent] before. You're right that surprising or frightening the audience is a major element of this kind of work, but sheer terror isn't the only thing I'm going for. I think the biggest thing is to shake readers emotionally, but only ever so slightly. That slight disturbance grows within each reader in its own unique way; that's what's important. What that seed grows into—the direction it takes, how widely it spreads, how deep it goes, how deep it is, its color and smell—are outside of my control, and that's the real key to transmitting a creative work.The artwork of the horror scenes always pop up right in your face with some really unnerving portrayals of paranoia-inducing oddities. It happens quite frequently as well, as the chapters are extremely short and always end with a bizarre twist. I wouldn’t say anything in here is truly terrifying, but it’s constantly eerie, atmospheric and visually uncomfortable. NAKAYAMA: There's no particular message. The commingling of past and present simply shows that wills can be connected across time and space. Nightmare Face: Deformed faces, with various numbers of eyes, mouths and rows of teeth, are prominent in the ghosts and monsters featured in the stories.

The ethos of quiet terror Nakayama had so masterfully cultivated in the first volume was mostly absent - going straight into jump scares and creepy imagery which makes sense as a progression of the series, but with limits. PTSD Radio volumes 1-6 are currently available in print as three omnibus volumes from Kodansha Comics. You can read our review of the digital version here and in the Fall 2022 Manga Guide. NAKAYAMA: When I was a kid, my uncle on my father's side got me and a bunch of my cousins together at my grandma's house to tell scary stories, and that's where my interest started. As a matter of fact, though, I'm quite the scaredy-cat! I can't bring myself to watch horror movies or TV horror series. I won't go into haunted houses, and I'm too scared by other horror manga to read anything but my own work! Maybe it's because I'm so readily scared that I'm so full of frightening ideas—it might be exactly what enables me to create these stories.

Interest Stacks

PTSD Radio has story and art by Masaaki Nakayama, with English translation by Adam Hirsch and lettering by Pekka Luhtala. Kodansha Comics released the first volume digitally in 2017 and will release its first and second volume as physical omnibus version for the first time on October 18. The various eerie things that appear in PTSD Radio aren't given names in the story, but do you have names that you personally use for them?