The Thousands

Monster Men is Japanese manga gone septic. Sex with foetuses still in their wombs. Nun rape. A mutated sperm who has daddy issues. Takeshi Nemoto’s Monster Men: Bureiko Lullaby, is a squalid cartoon collection, finally translated into English.
 
The book’s central tale takes in the life of a transvestite sperm who, after being ejaculated to life by a masturbating sailor off the deck of a ship into the nuclear burn of an A-bomb test, embarks on a Henry Miller-esque voyage of discovery. Ridicule, sexual abuse, and giddy schoolboy puppy love all scar our pure-hearted sperm, who flops and slops his way across Nemoto’s filthy pages.**Takeshi Nemoto is justifiably the bad boy of Japanese manga. Originally featured in the underground Garo manga in the mid-1980s, Nemoto’s work is, on the surface, shamefully putrid and offensive, guaranteed to electrocute any jaded manga-phile. Monster Men, Nemoto’s masterpiece, looks like something your fucked-in-the-head 13 y.o. brother would doodle on his maths book, yet tells poetic stories that are all at once satirical, poignant and (and you won’t believe this) freakishly beautiful. I cried.