Review |
| By: Nicholas Driscoll |
Shotaro Ishinomori is one of the greatest names in pop culture entertainment in Japan. Not only is he listed alongside Osamu Tezuka as one of the biggest names in manga (he is known as the King of Manga and holds a Guinness World Record for most manga pages drawn by one individual), Ishinomori also stands tall alongside Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburayaas one of the most prolific and influential tokusatsu creators of all time—perhaps THE most influential. Ishinomori is the man responsible for the Masked Rider franchise (astonishingly popular in Japan, with dozens of individual series, movies, comics, games, manga and more), as well as Super Sentai, which later went on to become a little something called Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers in the West. Both the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai franchises have dozens and dozens of individual TV series (similar to seasons, but with renamed, reimagined yearly reboots), and concomitant theatrical films. Godzilla may have around forty films, but BOTH Kamen Rider and Super Sentai have nearly forty TV seasons as well as dozens of theatrical and straight-to-video movies, a suite of content that buries the King of the Monsters. In addition, Ishinomori created many “lesser” shows, from Robot Detective to the influential Kikaider to Inazuman. Ishinomori’s tokusatsu impact wouldn’t really hit until the 1970s, but perhaps his first crossover with the genre was way back in 1963 before he really made a huge name for himself. In that year, he drew the manga adaptation of Ishiro Honda’s most beloved “transforming human” film, the moody and nihilistic Matango.
Ishinomori’s manga in general often has a certain fierce melancholy or sting of cynicism, at least based on the titles I have read. His Kamen Rider manga and subsequent television program is surprisingly dark, featuring Nazi-affiliated evil minions creating mind-controlled cyborgs for destruction. Even the hero happens to be one of these minions who simply manages to escape before complete assimilation. Ishinomori’s Himitsu Sentai Gorenger manga titles, the proto-Power Rangers, while less vicious than Kamen Rider, still feel harder-edged than the powerfully goofy television program, and his Robot Detective manga (perhaps inspired by Isaac Asimov’s novels) felt dark and pensive when I read the first volume some years back. His 18-page Matango adaptation was reprinted in the 2001 short-story manga collection Haguruma (“cog”), which is itself filled with dark and twisted stories. Just flipping through the pages reveals tales of lust, cannibalism, murder, and depravity, including some themes I hesitate to even mention here. All that is to say, Ishinomori is a great match to Honda’s most pessimistic horror tale.
The story of Matango is loosely based on the short story by William Hope Hodgson (famous for his sea-themed horror, and an influence on H. P. Lovecraft), reimagined by science fiction writer Masami Fukushima (who published his own short story based on the material), then later adapted (with input from famed short story writer Shinichi Hoshi) into a screenplay by the dour Takeshi Kimura (famous for some of the more pessimistic Toho scifi films, such as Frankenstein vs. Baragon and its sequel). The movie was not the first mushroom-zombie film, as the American film The Unknown Terror featured a mad scientist experimenting on violent fungus men in a cave six years before Toho’s release. Matango would greatly overshadow The Unknown Terror, which is largely forgotten today—outside of the occasional joke about its sudsy climax. Ishinomori’s manga version of Matango was published in the August 1963 issue of Shonen (“boy”), the same month the film was released. While the movie version was not a massive hit upon release, it has maintained a cult following, with references in cult media ranging from horror-classic manga The Drifting Classroom to mecha-comedy Dai-Guard to DC’s Swamp Thing and possibly even video-game-and-TV sensation The Last of Us. (I recommend Frankie B. Washington’s “A Funny Thing Happened on my Way to Frankenstein’s Island” comic short from 2019 for a particularly amusing take on the matango mythos.) The movie also has a sequel novel, nearly six hundred pages long, titled Matango: Final Counterattack, which adds multiple new wrinkles to the mythos—including astronauts and bioterrorism! The manga version is not a huge departure from the original movie, though it does have its discrepancies, which I will explore below.
Note that I will be discussing spoilers in this review, to provide a more thorough analysis.
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| Coming across the ship wreck |
The story goes, in the comic version, a group of five ne’er-do-wells steal a yacht for a good time at sea and end up shipwrecked due to a storm (it’s hinted that the inclement weather may be due to atomic testing). The group here are mostly unnamed, except for a rich girl named Akemi and a trigger-happy nuisance named Yoshida. The leader, presumably Murai, is a self-consciously “cool” young man wearing sunglasses who takes a shine to Akemi. The five hapless adventurers end up on a mysterious island and are desperate for food. They take up in an abandoned old ship and discover the remains of bizarre tests on animal subjects inside. Eventually, crazed by hunger, Yoshida and some of the others begin eating the enormous and ubiquitous matango mushrooms all over the island (here, they are described as a type of the “first discovered” mushrooms, dubbed matango). Akemi and the unnamed hero become close and break off from the others for a brief time, only to return when Yoshida (in a frenzy) murders the rest of the crew with a rifle, presumably in self-defense. When the unnamed hero and Akemi come upon Yoshida, they discover he has now turned into a mushroom monster, and just then dozens of other mushroom creatures swarm in to attack, forcing the protagonist and Akemi to run away. The male hero is separated from Akemi and scrambles for safety, blabbering that no one will believe what he witnessed, and the story ends.
So much of the movie version's depth and misandry is stripped away from this simplified adventure. The cast is shrunk down, most lose their names, and all of them lose their jobs and most of their backstories. Here, while the characters have individual personalities (fat-and-goofy guy, angry guy in white, cool hero, stylish woman, and the half-crazed and impulsive Yoshida), it's a weaker substitute for the backstabbing tangle of passions from the film. (I think Ishinomori may have designed the characters loosely after the actors and their costumes/outfits from the film; their outfits are color-coded in the film, as YouTube critic Paper Finz points out, and as a result individual characters can roughly be mapped onto the manga equivalents.) We do at least get a hint that these are not good people in the comic; they apparently stole the boat, which was not the case in the film (in the short story, we get the additional detail that some of the characters are interested in taking part in a yacht race). However, in the movie, there are jealousies, power plays, sexual dalliances and betrayals, stolen food, attempts and dark alliances. In the film, a character even attempts to flee with the remaining supplies. Just about everyone is shown to be selfish, even cruel, sometimes to an extreme; a rancid self-interest permeates the film, and with little real progression since those who are bad apples stink from the start. The manga softens the nastiness significantly, with only Yoshida proving especially mean-spirited—and when he does kill the other members of the group, it's only after he has begun to change into a fungus monster. Akemi is nothing like Kumi Mizuno's narcissistic seductress Mami, either; instead, Akemi seems to simply be running away from a stifling life of privilege to try a slice of excitement, and it cut too deep in the end. It's easier to think this hapless crew are less being punished as due recompense for their own evil so much as that they were victims of circumstance. Actually, as the crew explores the island, there are multiple humorous moments in which their panicked search for food is depicted with cartoonish humor, which gives them a pathetic likability.
Still, the ending remains harsh. As in the movie, ultimately, we are left with one man escaping alone, though in the comic we don't know if he manages to make it back to civilization. In the film, the entire tale is told in flashback, as we know protagonist Professor Murai (a sympathetic character, though he may be dating his own student) made it back to Japan and is now trapped in a psych ward. The framing device is used both in the short story version by Fukushima and the final film, though with one key difference. In the film version, there is a final, devastating reveal that Murai was infected by the matango (perhaps suggested by Shin'ichi Hoshi). In the short story, Murai shows the doctors that he was not infected, and at least one doctor doesn't even believe his story, and he is treated as insane. In all the versions, no one is shown to have truly escaped unscathed, with the film making the most explicit condemnation: we are all monsters. Not that Murai is let off the hook in the short story, nor in the comic; he comes across as less "innocent" in both. In the short story, he comes across his girlfriend partially transformed into a mushroom monster ands then bumps into another mushroom beast; fungi dust gets into his mouth, and the sweet taste triggers mad desire to consume more. The only thing that saves him is that he notices that the other mushroom people are his former friends and acquaintances due to remnants of their clothes… And he then proceeds to shoot them before escaping, apparently murdering them all. Finally, in the comic, while the unnamed hero manages to beat back the swarm of horrid mushroom beasts, we only see him run away into the distance, bewailing that no one will believe him… but he forsakes Akemi mere pages after promising he would be there for her. The sense of failure and ultimate despair still taints the manga.
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| The Matango closing in |
On a storytelling level, there is one other theme I want to at least touch upon: the origins of the matango and the research ship. In the film, the abandoned ship is shown to be a research vessel, and it appears as if the matango are a new strain created through radioactive experimentation. We get brief glimpses of other experiments (including a blind turtle), but the implication is that the plague that eventually consumes the crew is a humanmade disaster wrought through misused science. This theme is extended and altered in the manga, where the weather that brings down the yacht in the first place is also called out as coming from atomic experimentation. We get a better look at the mutated specimens on the research vessel, including a three-eyed turtle standing in for the blind terrapin from the film, as well as a crab with scissors instead of claws. It's less clear that the matango were created via the mad science onboard, given that Ishinomori throws in a line naming the matango as the first discovered species of mushroom (perhaps their evil nature comes from a primordial origin, like the blood of the coelacanth that de-evolves all who consume it in Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus). This "ancient mushroom" idea likely came from the short story, which includes a final line in which a senior doctor in the mental ward ponders whether he should tell his skeptical young colleague about the medieval medical texts he had read which mention the matango… Still, it's hard not to read a measure of blame towards science in the manga version as well, given that the mushrooms emerge from such a laboratory of horrors, and the general negative human portrayal of the tale.
A word on the art—Ishinomori worked directly with the Godfather of Manga, Osamu Tezuka, and his influence shines through clearly here. Like with Tezuka, the humans have an exaggerated, cartoonish anatomy (in contrast to, say, Jiro Kuwata, who worked in the same period, but who had a more controlled, realistic anatomy to his character designs). In general, characters appear childish, with the protagonist's appearance not far from a posturing teen. This sense of comical extreme creates a cast of distinct characters, each with differentiated silhouettes and demarcated facial features… though they look as if they may have tromped in off a wacky comical cartoon short rather than a horror show.
On the other hand, the matango creatures are at times scarier here than in the film version. The final form of the matango creatures as shown in the movie are portrayed as lumbering men-in-suits, ambulatory fungi, which while generally handled well (with a bizarre psychedelic vibe), can come across as more than a little silly. With the comic version, as everything is an illustration upon paper, the fantastic element of walking 'shrooms is absorbed by the expectations of the medium, and anyway, that rush of mushroom beasts that swarm our hero is a startling image regardless of how "silly" the central premise may seem.
The greatest weakness of Ishinomori’s Matango adaptation comes from the limitations of 18 pages against a cinematic story. There isn’t enough time to tell the story, and the manga suffers from its simplicity. Still, as a somewhat lighter take on a pitch-dark tale of madness and human depravity, Ishinomori’s reimagining breaths a different sort of life into a classic tale, and it’s worth reading. The reprint in Haguruma is the easiest to come by, but the pages are small, and they cut out the advertisements, leaving several huge blank spaces. It also removes all the colored pages. This review is based on the 2018 reprint included in the Godzilla All DVD Collector’s Box publication of Matango, which includes the ads, and while the quality of the paper is the usual—barely superior to newsprint—at least it retains the advertisements and the color printing and is sized more like a magazine. While I did not purchase the box, I managed to snag a loose copy of the manga on Yahoo Auctions, and I recommend tokusatsu manga collectors to attempt to follow my footsteps.
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| By: Anthony Romero |
First off, thanks again to Nick for sharing this manga so we could do another group review. Before diving in, I should say that I'm a big fan of Matango (1963). I consider it one of Honda's finest films, and my personal favorite from his body of work. It's a fascinating exploration of how societal norms begin to break down under pressure. What makes it especially compelling is how the darker sides of the characters, only briefly hinted at during the film's more cheerful beginning, gradually emerge as they struggle to survive.
Part of what makes the film so effective is that it gives its characters room to breathe. Over time, their personalities take shape in the harsh environment, revealing complex layers (helped along by some excellent performances). So naturally, I was curious to see how a 19 page manga adaptation could handle that kind of psychological depth.
In short, while the manga has its moments, it ultimately lacks what made the original so powerful. That's not to say it's without merit, as I did enjoy it, but it's very loose with the source material. In fact, it feels more like a prequel or sequel than a straight adaptation.
Seeing as Nick already provided a solid summary of the story, I'll jump right into the characters. The manga is so brief that only two characters are actually named. One is Yoshida, originally a writer in the film, who here is reimagined as manic and almost cartoonishly gun-crazed. The other is Akemi, a completely new character who doesn't resemble either of the female leads from the movie. The rest of the cast remains unnamed, which is particularly odd given that one of them clearly functions as the lead.
Now the story diverges significantly from the film. While the movie made good use of its characters' varying economic backgrounds, highlighting how wealth and class shaped their responses to the survival situation, this element is absent in the manga. In the film, the use of a yacht made narrative sense, as some characters were wealthy. In the manga, the ship is stolen, and the tone of the characters shifts accordingly. Where the film leaned into psychological horror, the manga mixes in over-the-top humor and exaggerated antics, almost bordering on black comedy.
That said, despite its flaws, the manga really shines during the climax. I agree with Nick that the Matango creatures, arguably the weakest part of the film, are much more effective here. In the movie, they served more as a grim metaphor for the characters' descent after consuming the mushrooms. In the manga, they come off as a genuine threat, more like traditional zombies. Without spoiling too much, Yoshida's transformation is sudden and shocking, with the artwork selling the horror. It's especially jarring because it follows such a comedic lead-in, making the tonal shift even more abrupt and impactful. As the Matango swarm the survivors, the unnamed protagonist barely escapes, but the ending feels rushed, like the reader could have expected to find a page or more to really wrap things up.
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| Yoshida's fate |
In terms of the art, Shotaro Ishinomori's style feels somewhat mismatched with the story's dark themes. His exaggerated character expressions can occasionally pull the reader out of the narrative. However, that lightness early on does make the darker climax hit harder, even for readers already familiar with the film who are expecting it. Ishinomori does particularly well with the Matango designs, which feel threatening and eerie. I also appreciated his depictions of the unnamed male lead and Akemi for whom, though stylized, feel more grounded than some of the other characters.
Overall, this would probably have worked better as a prequel or sequel rather than a direct adaptation, considering how far it strays from the tone and structure of the original film. Framing it that way could have made it more appealing to fans. Imagine if, instead of rehashing discovering the radioactive experiments on the ship, the characters stumbled across a relic from the crew of the yacht from the movie. Of course, that's said with a modern awareness of the film's cult status, and at the time this manga was published, many readers may not have even seen Matango. Still, it's an intriguing reinterpretation of the concept, even if it sacrifices much of what made the 1963 film so impactful due to the brief nature of the manga.
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| By: Sean O'Leary |
Matango (1963) is generally considered one of Ishiro Honda’s top non-Godzilla films. Rife with character drama, tension, and color, it’s an expressive film that is a must watch for any Toho fan. It’s one of my personal favorite films in Toho’s catalog and I was curious when I found out it received a manga adaptation. Written by Fukushima Masami and illustrated by Ishinori Shotaro, it’s a loose adaptation of the film. While I’m grateful to have been able to read this, and it’s interesting from a historical perspective, I must admit it removes a lot of what makes the 1963 film special.
Obviously, condensing an entire film into 15 pages is going to result in severe truncation. I’ll elaborate later, but most of the film’s backstory with the characters has been erased. Their circumstances are different too; in a manner similar to Ebirah Horror of the Deep (1966), it’s established that in the comic the party has stolen the boat. It seems to be that our cast of characters in the manga adaptation are not a crew full of sophisticated welloff city slickers, each with their own sins, but rather a random group of ruffians. It’s fine within the context of the comic, but it’s the biggest and earliest indicator that the comic is completely devoid of what made the film so great.
One of the biggest changes in the comic from the manga is the tone. Matango (1963) is notoriously unsettling and a bit of a slow burn horror film. The movie takes its time to establish various settings, and allow characters and audience to take in the atmosphere. By contrast, the comic adaptation is frantic and comedic. There’s a lot of little jokes and visual gags. When the group discovers the strange experiments aboard the wrecked ship, a goofy three-eyed turtle pops out to startle Mami’s comic counterpart. When the starving characters come across the mushrooms for the first time, one of the characters jumps up in joy, tongue out, almost like a dog.
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| Discovering the Matango mushrooms |
In addition, because the art style is basic and expressive, the comic can appear more childish to modern readers than contemporary ones. It might seem jarring to have childish simplified faces encounter mushroom terror, but it’s not all that different to other manga at the time. Contrast this to some of the early (and later!) works by Tezuka Osamu and you’ll see that Japanese manga is no stranger to a contrast in style and tone. Whether this is acceptable to readers is up to personal preference, but some may take issue.
Another big plot difference is how immediate the transformation from human to mushroom-thrall is. In the movie, the transformation was gradual and often occurred after the characters had already reached a breaking point; In many ways, the mushroom-fication was a representation of the complete loss of humanity and a full descent into madness. The final scene of the film was a horrific and eerie reveal after tremendous build-up and intracharacter drama.
In the comic, all it takes is one bite of the mushrooms in one panel and then on the same page the transformation has begun. The comic then quickly wraps up with the horde of the matango-creatures (which the dialogue confirms to be the crew of the ship) encircling and attacking the characters as they feebly try to fight them off.
Still, there are some creepy moments and details. When the group enters the wrecked ship on the island all the mirrors inside are broken. I might be misremembering, but in the film, I believe all the mirrors have been removed, not destroyed. It’s a subtle, but the way this information is conveyed through Akemi’s reflection on broken shards of glass, does add to the creep factor. And this is minor, but the manga’s cover is perhaps the most unsettling part of the comic. The way that the silhouette of the Matango creature stands mysteriously behind the boat is foreboding.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are the changes to the drama and structure of the characters. While tension is still present in the comic, most of the characters have had their backstories cut. In the movie, there is the singer Mami played by Kumi Mizuno. She’s a bit flirtatious, and her actions cause a lot of infighting over the men fawning over her. In the comic, a similar character, who appears to be a hybrid of Mami and Akiko, named Akemi, is the only woman aboard the ship. The only information we get about her character, is that she was a rich and luxurious girl, who was sick of being pampered. It’s so brief, and happens right before she’s overwhelmed by the Matango, that it’s easily forgettable. It’s far less interesting than the dynamic of the lascivious Mami against the more conservative and innocent Akiko, as well as their respective romantic interests.
This is a spoiler for the film, but the ending is also different, and unfortunately for the worse. While who I assume to be Murai escapes, there’s no follow-through. The film shows Murai’s fate, revealing the fact that he was infected by the mushrooms and ends on commentary about Tokyo and its vices not being unlike those of the same Murai encountered on the island. It’s a thought-provoking stinger, that ties together the film’s themes and elevates it from a pulpy deserted island film with zombies to a thoughtful and cautionary classic. Remove this, and the story becomes hollow, a mere frenetic race for survival.
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| Narrowly fleeing the Matango |
In summation, “Matango” by Fukushima Masami and Ishinori Shotaro is a very watered-down version of the film. It’s a result of its limited space and the medium, being unable to take the time to allow things to develop, and as a result most of the movie's key moments are cut. The comic’s climax is quick and rather rushed, and it’s missing a lot of the context that makes the film so fantastic.
If it sounds like I’m being overly critical, it’s less of an inditement on the manga’s quality and more of a praise of the original Matango film. That film, a classic in its genre, excels at establishing tension and developing its characters before its mushroom-filled finale. Likewise, it has the time to showcase disturbing scenery in vibrant color, such as when Mami finally succumbs to eating the mushrooms. The creepiness of the mushroom monsters laughing like children cannot be topped. I can go on and on about specific visuals in that film, like when the first mushroom person appears, gaunt and ghost-like, standing in the doorframe, or the fanciful flashbacks to the nightclub in Tokyo. The images, visuals, atmosphere, and aura, of Matango stick in my brain, almost as though I’ve been infected by the fungus itself.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the manga itself. Still, I’m appreciative of being given the chance to read it, thanks to Nick Driscoll. |
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