WARNING:  This book contains EXTREME CONTENT + DISTURBING IMAGERY*

Suehiro Maruo is a singular creator possessed of enormous – and disturbing – talent. His career spans five decades and he has amassed a large body of work in his native Japan, but his work has only been published sporadically in English translation, likely due to it being considered beyond the pale by most publishers outside of Japan.  As recently as 2024 none of his work was in print in North America.  That changed with this Bubbles Press release of Beautiful Monster in the spring of 2025 and Last Gasp’s subsequent softcover reissue of The Strange Tale of Panorama Island in the fall.

In addition to appearing, right out of the gate, to be the product of a manga master, Maruo's work also incorporates drawing techniques, visual stylings and tropes from early 20th century illustration originating in America and Europe.

Maruo’s aim of generating a sense of horror in the reader is not gratuitous nor solely employed for shock value, but is in turn in the service of other goals.  Many of the 16 short pieces collected here are narratively structured along lines analogous to those of the classic EC horror comics that were created in America during the early 1950s.  Those, usually eight-page, comics that EC produced employed horror motifs to critique social and cultural mores and norms, to show the rot and decay that dwelt beneath the gleaming surfaces of post-war American abundance.  Thirty years later, in the early 1980s, Maruo created work similarly exposing rot and decay that went far deeper, into the ancient roots of Japanese society, where heretofore unsuspected skeletons lurked in closets and previously hidden spirits had been secretly haunting society’s margins, and which had festered becoming ever more putrid – along with those adjacent and associated skeletons and spirits from the Western world – revealing the dark and debased side of patriarchal rule and its support structures.  

Maruo’s work is visually riveting, serving to pull readers’ eyes further and deeper into the page… in order to assault them!  His signature motif of a tongue to the eye can be interpreted as a potent symbol of this aim.

In Beautiful Monster, Maruo’s depictions of the grotesque and perverse are unrestrained in their unparalleled particularity and detail, representing his pursuit of an obscene carnality – one that can be seen as the epitome of body horror, wherein horror is equated with the human body per se.  This volume has been edited and translated by North America's foremost expert on underground horror manga, Ryan Holmberg and includes two short essays, one by Maruo, himself and the other by Michiro Endo.

For those readers intrigued by Maruo’s artistry but preferring not to be subjected to his more extreme obsessions we recommend the recently reissued The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, an exquisitely rendered phantasmagoria in which Maruo’s impulses have been somewhat restrained as a result of it being a comics adaptation of a preexistent literary work.  

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*By way of illustration we’ll share the following anecdote.  “In the early 00’s, a professional comics maker, whose work had been published adjacent to and within the world of underground comics, and so was already well acquainted with work containing strong imagery from the fringes of society, asked  (roughly) “what’s new that would knock my socks off” and I recommended a then in-print collection of Maruo’s work that contained some of the same stories that are collected in Beautiful Monster, which he then purchased.  When I next encountered him, I asked him what he thought of it.  His response was, ‘I wish you had never showed me that book.  It really messed with my head.’”