Watch out, this manga splatters!

For Shintaro Kago, the body is a playground. Or open-source software susceptible to modification (or, directly, hacking). Or a piñata that needs to be burst to discover what candies and toys it hides in its belly. All of this, in short, to say that the panels of the mangaka, a distinguished guest of this year's Comic Barcelona, spill fluids, viscera, and all sorts of unimaginable substances. , the title just published by Moztros, is no exception: the four chapters that make up the bulk of this volume have as their leitmotif the intrusion of sharp items (worms, cables, spaghetti...) that cause havoc and burst the characters from the inside out.With this premise, it is understood that Kago is one of the most prominent contemporary exponents of eroguro, a Japanese aesthetic tradition that delights in showing grotesque scenes, extreme violence, and aberrant sexuality, and which, far from being the exclusive heritage of manga, links revered ukiyo-e painters such as Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, writers like Edogawa Rampo, and filmmakers acclaimed at Sitges like Shinya Tsukamoto. In addition to defending a particularly psychedelic take on nausea (it's no wonder that the twisted electronics producer Flying Lotus commissioned him to design the cover for his album

You’re dead!), Kago's style is characterized by constantly questioning the very language of comics. In the same way that they dissect anatomies, the author's most memorable works (such as Fraction or Reproduction by Mitosis, a story that gave its name to the anthology with which he debuted in the Spanish market) open up the page to carry out experiments that take the metalinguistic tickles of Winsor McCay and other pioneering masters who understood that the frame of the panel is extremely elastic to the abyss.

Tract, originally published by the Italian publisher Hollow Press, is not so formally adventurous. In fact, it stands out precisely for its clear character, as if Kago had wanted to minimize conceptual baroque to concentrate on the sequence of a dialogue-free narrative and work with wider panels than usual, with few characters and backgrounds of everyday minimalism. And, above all, it breaks with the parameters of manga by incorporating color on all pages, with soft watercolor tones that contrast with the virulence of what is shown to us. Because, although Tract presents a certain character of aesthetic exceptionality within his production, the personality of Shintaro Kago is instantly recognized in the accumulation of physical explosions it projects, with illustrations that seem to quote the most unassumable frames of Lucio Fulci and the body horror of David Cronenberg, and nightmare narrative models that can refer as much to the vengeances from beyond the grave of the EC Comics publisher as to the apocalyptic spirals of Junji Ito.

Moztros rounds off its edition of Tract with Industrial revolution and World War, a shorter piece also free of dialogue that offers the umpteenth variation of one of Kago's favorite themes: panoramas of uchronian civilizations on the verge of collapse, which in this case is embodied in a war between cats and insects that transform giant human heads, torsos, and limbs into killing machines, until reaching mutually assured destruction. Despite being independent, it is revealing that the two works compiled by Tract close in an identical way, with full-page panels of terminal devastation. It is here, precisely, where the reverse of Kago's poetics is found. The body as a game, yes, but also as an insignificant and inert residue. As rubble.