Episode 51 - PTSD Radio by Masaaki Nakayama

Hair is hell!  In this episode I discuss  the Manga,  PTSD Radio by Masaaki Nakayama. This is anything but a traditional story. 

Next Week! Chainsaw Man Vol 1-5 by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Hosted by Vic, I used to use my middle name, Adam. 

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Comic Books Beyond would like to thank:  The Crew of the Talking Comics Podcast, Brandon McNulty, Lisa and Brad from Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffe, Jeremy Whitley, Jimmy Gaspero and John Klein III of Shadow and Flame with Magik Podcast. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody and welcome to the Comic Books Beyond Podcast. On this show, we're all about helping new or old readers find new stories. We focus on accessibility and demystifying the weird stuff, but we try to keep the magic alive, and we are anti-gatekeeping. Alright, this week we are talking about PTSD radio by Masaki Nakiyama, Omnibus One, which includes parts one and two, chapters one through 31. This is available digitally as a single purchase, probably on whatever platform of your choice is, and you can also buy physical copies of this wherever you get you manga. So if this is your first time hanging out with us, my name is Vic. Sometimes I have co-hosts, sometimes I don't. This time it's just me. We're talking about this book today, uh, which I first found in 2022. I was kind of in a dark place after my mom died, and my life was spiraling out of control, and I was looking for the darkest stories that I could find to comfort myself. I heard a story about a manga so dark that the creator had to stop drawing it because they physically got sick creating it. It's hard to find a real full firsthand account of this online, but search PTSD radio, and one of the first things that's gonna come up is how the creator got sick writing this and they had to stop doing it. A haunted comic book is always gonna get me interested. This could simply just be marketing, and you'll find a lot of speculation on that online as well. But regardless, it got me interested and wanted me to buy or got me to buy it. Also, Katia thought the uh art in this looked cool, so I bought it for her. She never read it. So what do I think of this one? Uh let's first do some content warnings, because there's some dark stuff in here. Content warning for almost everything: sexual abuse, misogyny, self-harm, blood, terror, death, disease, cancer, call to the void. It's all here. So I just want to get all that out of the way. And now we have to ask the really important question. How in the chicken fried fuck can I make this fun for anyone? Well, I like a challenge. So let's see what we got. So I'm not gonna do a uh traditional story recap here. This isn't a traditional narrative. This is about little moments. If you want to put this in food terms, this is a decent enough steak that is coated in good seasoning and flame-grilled and basted in butter and herbs, and it all works together to become better than the sum of its parts. Sorry, I made a really good steak this weekend that I posted about on Blue Sky. It was way better than it had any right to be. So each chapter of this story is presented as a radio frequency. Each is an anthological story about a small event. I've heard this described as a cursed item story, and I don't think that's a hundred percent accurate. This book is really more of a cursed moment story. I think there's an overall meta-narrative here which is really cool. Like I said, it might be bullshit marketing or not. The fact that this book will never finish makes it unique in a way. One of the biggest terrors you can of the biggest terrors you can experience as a as a reader or a writer is never finishing the story you're reading or writing. While it definitely detracts in a way, does it also not make this particular story cooler? Like, you'll find more about the horror of the writer of the mangaka than you will about this actual story online. You'll find a decent story or a decent amount of content about this. This one's pretty popular. But the first thing that almost always comes up is this story is so dark that the person had to stop creating it. So let's talk about some of my favorite moments from the first part of the volume. Strangely, there's a weird motif about hair loss in here. While this one is super triggering, making something as innocuous as hair is terrifying. It's kind of an interesting concept. In a way, hair is life and death. I'm currently thinning my hair pretty bad, and I still think it looks great, but time isn't on my side with it. I'm still healthy and healthier than I've ever been, but it's a reminder that I'm not as young as I used to be. This recurring motif of hair loss is, or just hair in general, is it just a reminder of that. I often think about death at times and how horrifying it sounds. But then to comfort myself, I think of a mortal life, and I often think that's worse. You just bound to go crazy. As we look at life as a story, we want stories to end, and death is an ending. I think by extension of this metaphor, hair is vitality, but it's also a pain in the ass to keep up with. Not to mention, something we see as healthy is also kind of gross at times. We like the hair in our heads and maybe in our beards, but sometimes people are off-put by body hair. I am not going to kink shame or body shame anyone. I don't care, like what you like, and don't give people shit. Especially for things they can't control. But sometimes hair when you find it in weird places is just off-putting, like when you find it in the spiral of a dream. So, what are other good moments in this book? There's a simple story about just seeing a dark reflection on a bus. It is actually dealing with hair loss, but it's the reminder of you're going that other people are seeing you different than you see yourself, that you're going to see yourself different someday. There's another story that has a bit of a shining reference where someone is just writing the same phrase, Agashisama, all over their school at night. This phrase repeats all over the book. I believe this is from what I could find online, maybe some kind of a reference to like a dark spirit. I I really couldn't say. I think it might have been created for this, and I've only read the first uh omnibus of this, so I don't know if that's explored later, or if it's just an open-ended question that the mangako wanted us to mess wanted to mess with us about. Some of these chapters are as simple as three dudes standing around and seeing four shadows. There's the idea of the creeping death, which is again reinforced by Hare. The idea that people need to die and your time is your time, and preventing it can often make it worse. I'm not trying to bum anybody out when I say this, but these are just ideas that come up here. As far as if this is just a good story, it's really hard to say because this isn't a story. Some stories are better than others, but that's going to be true of any anthology collection. And some of these stories, they seem connected, like you see recurring motifs, hair, baldness, dark moments, called of the void, Agashisama. Do you see a recurring statue over and over again? Now, some of these, like I said, these are moments, not stories. But I often tend to like that more than a traditional three-act structure sometimes. It's just refreshing. It's cool that you hit all your plot beats, but sometimes I just want something different. It gets too seamy. I honestly don't care about traditional plot structure. I think it's a good way to review a story or teach a young writer to story, to write a story, but sometimes I don't think we're just I think we're just too beholden to that and it stifles creativity. Tonally, this is dark as fuck. This has got a bit of an edge of comedy at the same time in the absurd sense. Comedy and horror are the same genre. They're just using different parts of the reflection. Comedy and horror all are about timing and subversion. But instead of subverting in a fun way, you do it in really dark ways for horror. And it's on full display here. As far as this hits the three-part harmony of storytelling, I think it does. For newcomers, I believe good storytelling follows a three-part harmony, meaning the right story for the right character using the right themes. While this stories like the characters in these stories, they're a hair above non-existence. Uh basically no one is a real person, no one feels like a real character. The characters in here are more or less window dressing. Some of them do recur, I think. It's you don't get a whole lot of names. It's very strange, but in a sense that the world is its own character, like the world of BTSD radio. It's kind of like a Faulkner novel. In a way, this is creating a strange self-insert where you, the reader, are put here. These are moments, not stories. These are stories about facing the absurd, the call of the void, death loss, hair loss, just the overall unexpected, a simple jump scare, not being able to process what you're seeing. We've all seen confusing perspective, and sometimes it's weird, sometimes it's sexual, sometimes it's terrifying. That's the beauty and terror of life. The unexpected is what we want. If we knew everything going in, we'd just be bored. So yeah, I think this does hit the three-part harmony. This is about the absurd and the unknown. As far as the art goes in this, I actually really like it for the most part. Uh, this book is the backgrounds kind of remind me of Junji Ito, like the horror elements, the the twisted hair, the way he draws trees in this book. It really feels heavily influenced by Junji Ito. If you'd like to hear more about Junji Ito, go back and listen to episode 48 of the show. And don't forget to email us at comic books at comic books beyond a gmail to vote in for the specific story for an episode on. The art in here is terrifying and twisted. It's simplistic, but it's stylized in a way that makes me feel like it was put through a blender or like a spiral of hair in the drain. If the background is Junji Ito, the people are reminiscent of the kids in Drifting Classroom by Ka Kazuzo Umez Umezu. Uh he was a huge inspiration of Junji Ito. I'm not the biggest fan of Drifting Classroom, or I believe he also did Oreochi. Uh that one's okay and it is it uh it inspired Tumiye. I think Junji Ito is just better. So, does this make me want to read more? Yeah, I'm just enjoying these. It's really scratching my itch for microterror right now. And I think I'm gonna read the rest. I don't know which format I'm gonna go with. I'm probably just gonna buy the rest of the volumes, and this is a second time read for me. I actually enjoyed this a lot more in the second time around. When I first was reading this, I think I wanted a story and not an experience. For a few years I was focusing too heavily on plot, which is not who I am. Plot's not bad, but it's not truly what I care about. The experience, how what I get out of a story, what a story makes me feel, that's what I want. And this story made me feel things. Good art should invoke a reaction. So I think this is doing its job. As far as the new reader-friendly scale goes, I'd say this is as approachable as possible. Most manga is. Stuff is gonna make you feel comfortable. So on a scale of one to five, one being the most approachable, this is like a one or a two. Let's call it a one. Because if you're picking up this book, you should know that you're getting into some utter horror. It's called PTSD radio. On the quality scale, just simply out of five, five being the best, I'd give this about a four. It's not gonna finish. So if you've and if you've read a few, you're more or less gonna get them all. The art is great, but it's not quite as good as or imaginative as what Junji Ito would draw. And it's not fair to compare to him, I think. And I'm not saying this book is bad, it's just not perfect. This is gonna be a strange experience for anyone. So this is a conditionally, I do recommend this one, as long as you're looking for something dark, as long as you're okay with a story in quotes that will never finish. And you're okay with self-contained horror. If you like anthologies, you'll probably enjoy this. If you like postmodern stories, you'll probably enjoy this. If you need a traditional three-act structure or a traditional narrative, I would avoid this one. I don't unfortunately have any other recommendations from this mangaka, but I am gonna look up their other work and check it out. Uh, but one but if this one tickles your pickle, I would really recommend checking out the Jun Anything by Junji Ito or Kazuzo Umizu. And also vote in our Junji Ito poll. So next week on, we are gonna try to bring you up and we're gonna still be doing well the light horror. It's fun horror. And we're gonna revisit Tasuski Fujimoto's in his world of Chainsaw Man. We're gonna cover approximately what's contained in season one of the anime, which is I think the first five volumes, give or take, or about 43 chapters that's available on Shonen Jump and Viz. And it's it's in paperback for pretty cheap, and you can always get a digital purchase. So that one is gonna be a lot of fun. Uh, I don't think I'll be able to re-watch the anime. I thought about trying to do like a uh anime to manga comparison, but I don't think there's literally any way I could do that. That being said, we will see you next week for Chainsaw Man. If you would like to stick around, we're gonna go to closing credits and thoughts. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get a hold of me through email, I'm at comicbooksbeyond at gmail.com, and I'm at comic books beyond on Blue Sky, Instagram, TikTok, and we're also on YouTube. Some of the podcasts are gonna go there, but we're also working on some extra content for YouTube as well. I'd like to give a thank you to the crew of the Talking Comic Books Podcast, Brad and Lease of Comic Book Couples Counseling, Alex Jaffey, Jeremy Whitley, Bran McNulty, Jimmy Gispero and the crew of Comic Book Yeti, and John Klein III of Shadowflame with Magic. Most importantly, I'd like to thank all of our listeners and supporters. Be good to each other out there and take care of your people. We'll see you next time.