Usamaru Furuya's "Lychee Light Club"

I accidently ran into manga artist/writer Usamaru Furuya's work via looking at the cover of his version of Osamu Dazai's great novel "No Longer Human." Mind you I haven't read it yet, but Dan at Skylight Books in Las Feliz put this little dynamite in my hands. "Lychee light Club" is a group of damaged kids who have a powerful unhinged chess loving' leader, who at the same age controls this goth gang. They kill, destroy, and build their own version of a Frankenstein, who has one human eye that belongs to a member of the gang.

The violence is very extreme and over-the-top, which .....makes this work better then others. The art here very much reminds me of another manga artist i.e. genius by the name of Suehiro Maruo, who is a major influence on Furuya. The manga is based on an actual theater piece of the same title and helped put together by Maruo - so this is very much a literal tribute to the original stage production as well as to the works of Maruo.

The narration is pretty good, but for me, its the visual aspect of the piece that grabs my attention. Its one long beauty of a penmanship by Furuya. Like everything else there is so much dregs in the field of manga, its nice to be exposed to someone who is really using the medium of comics to not only break into new ground, but also just pushing to the horror and violence that this medium is or can be great at.