There’s also a nearby blood river littered with refuse and severed body parts. Here countless people are beheaded each day, with the blood from the killings soaking into the ground and causing malignant blood flowers to sprout. The painter is now looking to create his final Panorama of Hell, which he promises will encompass the entire world.īefore creating this masterpiece the painter fills us in on the particulars of his existence, in a house located next to a busy guillotine. Also like Hino, the Hell painter went on to become an acclaimed, if irredeemably morbid, artist. It concerns an unnamed painter obsessed with blood and death, who like Hino nearly lost his life as an infant when his family fled from their native Manchuria to Japan in 1946. It is at once a black-humored gross-out spectacle and a deeply felt expression of personal anguish, with a narrative that parallels Hino’s own life in many respects.
I haven’t sampled enough of Hino’s work to proclaim this book his masterpiece, but nothing else I’ve read by him is nearly as remarkable. Blast Book’s edition of PANORAMA OF HELL marked Hino’s first-ever English language publication (the work of no less than five translators, among them the famed special effects ace Screaming Mad George), which is fitting. His slope-headed, bug-eyed personages are unmistakable, as is his love of blood, mutation, insects and hyperbolic close ups-all presented in stark black-and-white with garish sound effects. A pitiless vision of Hell on Earth, manga style! Hideshi Hino, who’s scripted and illustrated dozens of manga volumes, has a style and viewpoint as distinct as that of any artist.
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