By Arpad Okay — Daisuke Igarashi understands reading is a trap. The magic of comics is that of real spells and hexes, the symbols on the page you pour yourself into have the power to leave you haunted. Igarashi’s writing isn’t an escape, it’s an enchantment that engulfs the reader. Darkness unfolds. Witches reaches out, emotionally, intellectually, and once you touch it back you’re cursed.

The horror is potent, but laid back — I was shocked by how visceral my reaction was to Witches. It reads like gothic horror, closer to fantasy than grindhouse, when it goes for deeply unsettling it succeeds. You can feel the trouble in the air. Igarashi is very matter-of-fact when it comes to magic, treating the supernatural as a given rather than a wonder. Yet each story is also a presentation of magic to the reader, sorcery being written about as the text instead of written into it. The moments when witchcraft does come into quick focus are explosive flashes of the majestic and the profane. Underlying it all is a respect for nature, sometimes driving the story as much as the witches do, but as skeleton not muscle. Think the elephant in the room treatment of environmentalism Hayao Miyazaki gave Princess Mononoke. The magic is up front and the naturalist is in back but given the ways of witch magic, you should have them together to tell it true.

A disquieting work, where the body functions as both a refuge from pain and a canvas for the unspeakable. Witches is borderline Cronenberg. Igarashi shows restraint that David doesn’t, which just makes it a different kind of worse. Eating the eyes and brains out of the bazaar. Grotesque done softly. Igarashi employs the Barry Windsor-Smith approach, beauteous form made gristle and gore: an Adonis stripped to the bone by the mouth of the beast.

The consequences for a chance meeting or a broken promise being Hellraiser-tier bad bring to mind manga by Junji Ito, but the strangeness and genre fiction depth of the circumstance and setting in Witches reminds me more of Taiyo Matsumoto. Like Ito and Matsumoto, Igarashi’s Witches first saw publication decades ago, its new Seven Seas complete collection brought into print because of the ravenous exponential growth of manga’s contemporary audience. That said, Daisuke’s ability to body the reader is timeless. Witches could have come out in 2022.

Igarashi draws it like his seinen manga peer group, too. Similar to Masamune Shirow or Yukito Kishiro, Igarashi isn’t from their super-detailed pulp vanguard, but his style walks in their footsteps. The tremendous amount of work, the number of pen strokes, put into any given panel or character and it not getting in the way of the pure cartoony simplicity of their characterization is a real Inio Asano element I also enjoy about Igarashi’s style. Though Witches is really channeling some profane William Blatty stuff, not sad girls with cyberpunk attachments. Think Vanesa Del Rey, but Katsuhiro Otomo.

The illustrations are capable of depicting a spirit world in a way I don’t think other mediums could capture. Igarashi presents perspectives that leave the concrete world of a film camera’s framing and express concepts and planes of existence in ways that are magically sound but contradict visual sense. Tremendous respect to Katheryn Henzler for translating and Jamal Joseph Jr adapting a story that deals with so much metaphysical philosophy and bringing it across, its depth and facets preserved. Adian Clarke’s lettering does an equally magnificent job of capturing Iragashi’s style and showcasing it in full.

Witches is a tree. Its two volumes merged into a single trunk, a simple enough start to grasp, with complex roots that lie hidden beneath our feet, and branches expanding out over our heads into our world. As below, so above. Start with witchcraft, a secret world. Off the map, the medicine woman reads the warp and weft of life. Children of the new world dabble in whims, blasphemies, and vendettas. Once the conceit of it is given, magic is real, the next story steps into the broader, secret world we don’t know we exist in. A drama of the spirit world’s defense against the concrete and cash of modern mankind. It’s my favorite story in the book, a nightmare of what the plutocratic meddling with and erosion of nature does to the astral plane. Follow the tree down into the earth, its roots were always there.

The other half of Witches starts with high drama, genre fiction at its most America’s Best Comics or mainstream shonen manga. The kind of shadow organization that must exist behind the scenes in a modern world with magic squares up against a globally destabilizing spiritual science fiction apocalypse event. Like Alan Moore eldritch horror, a city crumpling under the weight of its own birth. Like Kelly Sue DeConnick visionary genre fiction, throwing garlands on the memorial of the one who saved the planet. The build carries over from Witches’ first half to the second through the center of the book, finally taking the small stakes of the first arc and applying them to the last. A world where witchcraft isn't exploited. A broken promise between thieves. A tree reaches into the sky with as many branches as roots, breathing in rhythm with the world. At the start, it was an acclimation of industrialized minds to the nature of nature, revelation. At the end, it trusts a secret to the reader. 

I think that Igarashi’s teaching us about hope. Earth magic is grisly and austere in price, but fair and free and sacred. There are organizations in these stories that mirror the ones we know. But Witches is an assertion that they do not control our world. Nature never bows. The story about the sliver of witch rock from space whose impact is much worse than a dinosaur meteor’s speaks directly to this. The unholy brotherhood that controls the world is powerless to stop it, but a single woman of no consequence, one who follows the way, can save the planet. And she does.

We can make a sacrifice institutions are incapable of.

Does that sound life affirming? It is! But don’t forget the baby stealing and love letter writing with your living flesh and a city brought to life but unable to die due to an atomic debris infection. Witches has some absolute Clive Barker visuals I can’t believe someone captured in drawing, let alone came up with. It’s horror alright. What kind of sacrifice did you think I was talking about?

MANGA REVIEW: Witches by Daisuke Igarashi

Witches by Daisuke Igarashi
Writer/Artist: Daisuke Igarashi
Publisher: Seven Seas
On a visit to a city in the far west of Asia, a British girl named Nicola falls in love. The object of her affection is Mimar, a man who works at the city's bazaar--yet despite her attempts, he turns her down. Upon returning home to England, the ache of her unrequited love festers. After years spent obtaining wealth, fame, and the Secret of the World, Nicola returns to the bazaar to exact her deadly revenge upon Mimar and those he holds dearest.
This story is one of many in this haunting collection that features tales of witches and dark magic set around the globe and in outer space. Winner of the Excellence Prize at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival, Witches is written and illustrated by Daisuke Igarashi, the critically acclaimed author of Children of the Sea.
Price: $24.99
Buy It Here: Paperback

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Arpad Okay’s degree in journalism and education means he can’t ever seem to separate the art from the anthropology in his features. Arpad writes about comics and culture for DoomRocket and The Beat and tweets about the world from @arpadokay