Hideo Yamamoto - Koroshiya Ichi aka Ichi the Killer

If you're into Japanese or extreme cinema in general you probably heard of or watched Ichi the Killer. A wonderful adaptation of this manga directed by Takashi Miike and starring Tadanobu Asano.

The movie itself was a fairly truthful adaptation when it comes to characterizations and main goals but naturally the plot of the movie finished rather soonish. Despite that it still felt like a complete journey. The manga is like the movie but with more of everything. The characters are much more fleshed out, each has a backstory and there are themes here which weren't explored in the movie. For example necrophilia wasn't even alluded in the movie (if I remember right, I haven't seen the movie in quite a while) and it has a prominent sub plot in the manga.

The overall plot is still pretty much the same on the other hand. Aside from how the end plays out of course.

Ichi The Killer is about a lot of themes but it's main storyline is about a guy called Ichi that goes around killing yakuza. He apparently thinks they bullied him in his childhood so he decides to chop them down with razor blades on his boots. Naturally he's guided by someone else called Jiji, an old man with somewhat questionable but still good goals. Jiji has his own henchmen who go after Ichi and clean up the mess and they plan to clean out a particular yakuza gang. Whats interesting about the plot is that there are essentially two main protagonists, the good guy and the villain. Both get equal time in the spotlight up to the point that you forget that there's the other guy as well. Some might consider this bad but I think it's balanced just right and it works well.

When it comes to gore and violence there's, of course, plenty of it and even more of it than in the film. This is obviously so because the movie has much more restrictions while the manga has only the limitation of the authors imagination. And his imagination goes to a lot places. In that department I think this is enough to satisfy most gore hounds.

Artistically speaking, eh, I wasn't really that impressed. A lot of drawings seem soulless and they sometimes lack the polish they deserve but this is probably because there are a 10 volumes and shit had to be done to publish it in an orderly fashion. The whole design and style actually reminds me a lot of Gantz (minus the gigantic boobies that are often featured in Gantz) so if you like how Gantz looks you'll have no problem here either. I just kinda like it when an artists tries different things and this just doesn't happen here. Nevertheless it's highly enjoyable and I firmly believe you'll breeze through these 10 volumes.

Part 1, 2 and 3.