All throughout July we’re crowdsourcing an Extra Eisners Reading List from comics journalists and critics. Each weekday throughout the month, we’ll post a new pick we would have liked to have seen nominated for an Eisner. There are so many great comics, it’s impossible for the Eisners to recognize them all. This list is to honor and diversify the pool of work praised by the industry.

Today’s pick comes from Justin Partridge…enjoy!

I am the first to admit that I am something of a neophyte when it comes to manga. As a critic, I’ve tried to allow myself room to grow in that regard and I feel like I’ve done a decent job at this last year. I resolved myself to take in more of the “canon” of this massive medium, both in reading for work and for pleasure throughout this ongoing Year of Hell that we’ve all collectively experienced. And am I truly glad I did, because that allowed me to experience No Longer Human.

The phrase gets thrown a lot, I know, but believe me when I say, I have NEVER read anything like No Longer Human. I’m not sure I ever will either. Junji Ito, now an established modern master of the macabre, transforms the seminal (and controversial) Japanese novel into a constant dream-state experience. Yozo Oba, our horribly abused, doomed, and sick brained protagonist, drifts from sequence to sequence, chained together by Ito’s reverential scripting and oppressively rendered scene construction.

Though this novel has been adapted a few times, across a few mediums now, I am absolutely comfortable with calling Ito’s version the superior one. It digs its claws into you and never once allows you to pause, taking you deeper and deeper into Oba’s feverish mind and deadly disconnection from humanity and reality. I might be a neophyte, but I know great, powerful art when I see it and No Longer Human is great, powerful, terrifying art.

Justin Patridge is a writer for hire with bylines at Newsarama, Dis/Member, and Rogue’s Portal. You can reach him at justin@betweenthepanels.com.

No Longer Human
Writer/Artist: Junji Ito
Original Novel: Osamu Dazai
Publisher: Viz Media
Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai's immortal -- and supposedly autobiographical -- work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo's mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.
Release Date: December 17, 2019
Buy It Digitally: No Longer Human, Vol. 1

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