The latest from Smudge is the most gruesome and horrific yet!  Mansect hails from a half century back – 1975 – and runs 240 monster-filled pages; a landmark work of horror manga. 

Smudge sez:

"Humans grow and age. They change. But always we are the same person, the same creature. Not so with insects, whose powers of metamorphosis alter not only their shape and size, but also their very beings. And now, because of one young man's unhealthy obsession with bugs, humans also find themselves transformed into disgusting, decrepit, bloodsucking insect monsters!

Published in 1975, Koga Shinichi's MANSECT is a shonen horror classic by one of the undisputed masters of the genre. Swarming with mesmerizingly gnarly imagery and freakish bio-evolutionary speculation, Koga here demonstrates why his name is uttered with the same quivering reverence as horror manga legends Mizuki Shigeru, Umezz Kazuo, and Ito Junji. MANSECT is the third volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg."

The masking of memories of childhood trauma via the monstrous seems to be an operative psychological aspect of the narrative; have gto keep digging to find out...