Starving Anonymous is both disgusting, and brilliant (volume 1, part 1)

Massive warning btw. Starving Anonymous is a very disturbing, gory, and disgusting manga. So, if you don’t wanna see ANY of that, turn away please. Also consider getting some quality therapy, things are gonna get REAL UGLY. Also! This manga is released in English digitally, so please the original release if you are interested in this manga.

Ok so, you know how people say Junji Ito’s works can be disturbing and really messed up? This manga, on its own, makes Uzumaki look like a volume of Yotsuba. Let’s get into it, shall we? Let’s start with volume 1.

So, lets get this out of the way first, the artwork in this manga is ridiculously polished. Artist Kazu Inabe is a crazy good illustrator, his characters having these really cool, stylized designs, but with a cartoonish, manga edge. Inabe’s art also has lots of great visual storytelling, however, sadly, the visual storytelling in this manga is either extremely explicit or gory, so i WON’T be showing some of the great work done by Inabe.

Ok, so this manga is set in a near-future Japan grappling with climate change and societal decline, the story follows high school student Ie and his friend Kazu. After being gassed on a bus ride home, they awaken in a facility known as “the Cradle,” where humans are bred and processed as food for monstrous, insect-like creatures. Monsters that look something like this.

Cuddly looking guy right? Well, they eat people. This whole idea about these monsters eating people, and being processed, is pretty much a not so subtle jab at the meat processing, packing, and fast food industry, where animals are slaughtered for cheap food, and their lives are basically forfeit. Later on, we see that Ie and Kazu meet these new characters, Natsune and Yamabiki.

Natsune’s the typical aggressive type, he throwing hands with everyone if necessary, we learn more about his backstory later on in the manga, but what we know now is that he is a man with a regenerating body. While Yamabiki… what is there to say about Yamabiki? He’s this androgynous man who’s sexuality is about as subtle as a truck smashing into a building and then exploding.

Natsune and Yamabiki tell Ie and Kazu not to consume any liquid being fed through the tubes in the cradle, as it fattens you up and breaks one’s mind, and disturbingly enough, Yamabiki finds… pleasure in this. Blech… however, theres something about Yamabiki that interests Ie, as if he knows more than he should about whats going on. Kazu, however, was already tempted by the liquid in the tubes, and becomes this… broken minded, over weight specimen, and throughout the manga, he becomes more and more of a challenge to deal with for Ie and the others.

This is kind of where things get more and more… well… disturbing. Ie and the others find themselves in a sticky situation, where this larvae stage caterpillar monster shows up, and eats one of the people in the cradle. We’ll get more into that later. Btw, most of the deaths in the cradle are men, there are women in these s, but for obvious reasons i can’t show you that, as there is nudity, any death scene in this manga will be shown with clothed men and women, as the “nude” deaths are too explicit and gruesome to post. Any nudity in the manga is obscured by the violence, so its… a win/lose/win i guess.

Thats all i can talk about for now, in another post, i’ll be talking about the rest of volume 1, and the other messed up stuff that happens in the first volume.

Be good people, and don’t eat while reading this manga.