There's something dark and unsettling here and also slightly repulsive. We notice immediately from the first pages, but still do not know why. Then we notice that many cartoons are full of insects, and flowers that show their stamens and pistils, and birds. Also the Drawing is something shocking. seems realistic without being exactly, is played with a rare and subtle expressiveness. The faces of some characters have a sinister, like out of a Murnau film. The shadows seem to come alive, a little also to the way the German Expressionist film. In some cartoons, faces, eyes or arms of the same character unfold, triples, four-fold, in an original graphic effect that conveys motion, tension or terror. A dreamlike atmosphere overwhelms it all, announced since the disturbing cover art and back.
The plot of the story approach, we know quickly through the mouth of one of the stars, is as simple as a fairy tale and makes it clear early that this is a vampire story. Although in the end, the argument does not matter as much as feelings, always strong and found that the reader will experience along the journey of two hundred-odd pages it has already undertaken. Everything happens in a spectral world ruled by sex and desire to do evil. Violence, present since the beginning, soon increases in speed and grade, is a graphic violence, extreme, unconventional, which covers a wide range of atrocities: vampire fangs to strike but not cutter, beheadings, mutilation, arson, infanticide, rape, mutilation, decapitation, strangulation. Sex, also ubiquitous, everyone receives treatment unhealthy or at least, "bizarre." Here is pedophilia, rape, boys who masturbate with a finger amputee women, teens orgies ending in bloody carnage. But what the author intended to tell us so much blood and sex? Moreover, is actually intended to tell us, or we are facing another story of "gratuitous violence" if that term has any meaning?
The author of the vampire's smile , Suehiro Maruo Japan (Kyushu, 1956) was born into a poor family, the youngest of seven children, one child "problematic" and extremely introverted, "Just I crossed a few words with my parents throughout my childhood. " Soon expelled from school at age 15 and living alone, and quickly took to the small shoplifting, something that eventually led to a two week stay in jail (some records stolen from Pink Floyd and Santana were the cause .) At 19 he attempted to place his first work in the famous Japanese magazine Shonen Jump , was rejected, at 24 getting published in a pornographic manga, but it was clear that was not an author Maruo porn. Since 1983 change his style to one more like that now owns, causing some scandal at the beginning and eventually turning him into the cult writer who is now in Japan the most famous of alternative cartoonists. style labeled ero-guru (erotic grotesque) that draws its content from extreme fantasies of heinous crimes and all kinds of sexual paraphilias, and inspired by the aesthetics of the Japanese masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth recorders of ukiyo- e or Japanese prints by some retro aesthetic of Japan and Germany in the thirties and forties, as well as ero-comic gore of Hanuishi Hanawa, his teacher said in the field of comics. Maruo's best-known titles: Planet of the Jap (which the author himself admits was inspired by the novel by Philip K. Dick The Man in Castle, in the Japanese comic book of Maruo win World War II and engaged in murder, rape and other niceties), Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (an orphan girl is kidnapped by a circus to be submitted all types of abuse) and, of course, the purpose of this review. Maruo has been published regularly in his country in the Garo dean underground magazine, and has been translated into English or Italian, while in Spain, his work was virtually unknown until now, as it is here in general all the Japanese underground. And it is undeniable that in a market so vast and rich as the manga, where everything has its place and audience, the underground must products also contain interesting and original. As it is without doubt the one that concerns us. vampire's smile is a work, above all subversive. Under all that morbid horror that we have seen throughout history, which, in fact, is the same story-beats a sense, there is an intention, someone has thought and pulling the strings. There is something about the images of Maruo, a rare and perverse poetry, primal symbolism, we sense that we understand more rationally, but that leads us to dig deep inside ourselves and deal with certain human truths. Maruo is subversive because it subverts our usual pattern of thought to liberate for a while (who does the reading of comics) for social and moral barriers that prevent us consider what we are, what each one exactly. "I use violence to better understand the world." As the nightmares, Maruo's work brings to the surface our fears and deepest desires and atavistic, our thoughts prohibited and repressed.
What Maruo weapons used to achieve their goals? Since then, the elegance and romantic realism of his drawing is one of its main resources, but also the tension in the design and planning to show your pages. And, of course, the visual poetry that particular version conceives his scenes, always ambivalent, causing revulsion at the same fascination. That big bullet, one of many examples where we see the boy lying on a girl vampire cutthroat, drinking their blood in the middle of a field of poppies, surrounded by butterflies, impresses opposing reasons: the scene is repugnant to us as a staging murder, but despite of that, we remain captivated unable to look away from her, the same mechanism that drives us to look at when we passed a car accident, unable to deny that the whole possesses a breathtaking beauty. Is this contradictory feeling of horror and sexual violence that disgusts us but also draws us secretly what disturbs us most of this comic, which makes us ponder over. It is not that Maruo "make violence attractive", is more subtle, more complex, similar to what we find in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the Gothic novel. What Maruo plasma in images is the attraction of our imagination has always exercised all that our reason and moral conviction that primitive and irrational side, through cultural mechanisms, we try to forget and hide from others and ourselves.
appeal to jurisdictions such intimate material handling only get ancient, archetypal, and Maruo knows. Materials that are constants in humans since ancient times, and thus incorporated into the mythology, fairy tales, folk legends. Of these materials are made Maruo comics. The most recurring archetype in them is childhood and its environs are home to as adults. "I'm interested in children, I will not tell adult stories. Adults always do the same thing, work, go home and sleep. "But the presence of children is not limited to the characters are schoolgirls and boys on the verge of adolescence, goes further. Maruo plays with the theme and its symbols to pervert, aware that our strongest moral taboos are built around children and everything that has to do with them: the boy arsonist of vampire's smile is not a psychopath "in power", but it already is his tender age, and their fellow students are not left behind (those beatings he hit the bum). The clown that appears in the cartoon is not "the friend of children" but a brutal rapist. There are a couple of explicit sex scenes between an old man and the girl he cares, just a teenager. Nor need the crime that disgusts us most of all, infanticide and, more specifically of infants (those babies stolen to serve as a sacrifice). 
Another favorite source of images for Maruo is, as Charles Burns, nature. Nature in all its contradictions, beauty and lack of piety, with all its grandeur and corruption, the nature and source of mystery, the greatest of mysteries, the site from which all life and where finally returns in an eternal cycle of reproduction and predation: the vampirism. Insects, worms, birds, flowers, trees, fish, sun, moon, drawing the wings of butterflies ... Hidden clues scattered throughout his cartoons. We could blame the obvious and repetitive cartoon of some of these symbols, the cobwebs, crows, in any case, a repair side that does not bother me. However, the main ingredient of this comic archetype, Maruo's work in general, is the relationship between sex and violence, and therefore death. What the author seems more interested in Japanese is always dark explore connections between passion and cruelty, pleasure and pain, desire and fear, the main engine of human tandem. Equation sex / death not only appears explicitly in numerous scenes vampire's smile, but also more allegorical, permeating the air, knife wounds and lips of the vagina, erotic premonitory nightmares, the urine of girls when they are killed. 
Given these obsessions, not surprisingly, Maruo has resorted to putting them into this comic to the ancient myth of the vampire, with all that it embodies: the blood as a source of life and, according to ancient beliefs, as host the soul, but also as a symbol of both elemental horror of desire. Suction and bite as a source of erotic pleasure, present in both the infant and child in the couple making love. The relationship between "live" and "dead", both literally and metaphorically. The night as a symbol of dreams and our dark side or just as a source of ancestral fear (although we have "forgotten" reason, man is instinctively afraid of the dark as a reminder of its past biological animal). Parasitism as a way of life and the foundation of human relationships. Sadism and masochism, the desire for suffering and death, relations between the executioner and his victim, their mutual dependence, the fatalism of their common destiny. All that is present in the different forms it has taken the vampire throughout history, and in this cartoon of Maruo. We are talking about an anthropological archetype that seems to come of the original structures of the unconscious and that is familiar to many cultures and eras. Contrary to popular belief, the vampire myth does not come originally from the legends Eastern European eighteenth and nineteenth century or the romantic literature of that era, but that is from far more ancient Mesopotamian legends, cultures Greek, Hebrew, Christian and Islam, including China, Nepal, Tibet and Malaysia. Something must have the vampire to his figure has existed in civilizations as far apart and, despite this, the various embodiments presented striking similarities. In his excellent foreword to the anthology of stories Vampire (Siruela Editions, 2001), Count of Siruela summarizes the myth as a concrete expression of our deep sorrow at the death and the eternal desire to escape it, but this case through the resurrection of the soul or reincarnation, but through conversion into an undead, someone who is not alive but not entirely dead, and you need to continue to exist, so addictive and incurable, life energy others. Essentially destructive nature of the vampire also represents, of course, the dark side of human beings. This ancestral craving for immortality at any price that represents the vampire is still alive in contemporary man, this current research in genetics and cloning to longer life. Therefore not surprising that artists of all ages have been attracted by the myth to recreate more or less success, above all, not coincidentally, after modernity and rationality of the Enlightenment: From the Romantics to Polidori and Bram Stoker, from Murnau to Coppola, from Ivan Zulueta to Anne Rice. 
Maruo also wanted to bring their own reading of the myth and in this sense has been achieved in the extraordinary comic compendium of traits from different vampire legends. For the examples in the scenes already mentioned, that can add the old hag that feeds on the blood of babies, an echo of the Lilitu Babylonian, the Hebrew Lilith or later lamia, a type of witch legends of Witch and Vampire are historically connected-stealing newborns to feed on them. Likewise, the impressive sequence where the vampire Maruo laterally along the wall climbing seems directly inspired by a scene Stoker's Dracula . The Japanese author has also incorporated some elements of actual documented cases of murderers who kill the blood sucking their victims, thus trying to give the vampire myth stripping glamorous realism and its more fantastic features (these vampires have no fangs but use knives, crosses and garlic do not cause any effect, etc.), but on the way Maruo terms appropriate to their thematic obsessions: The vampire in this comic book serves mainly as a metaphor for the marked, marginalized for life. "The land would not welcome me in her womb! Here's proof that one is a vampire!" Says the old hunchback comic book after being lynched for stealing clothes of the dead. Maruo This idea seems to rescue some old legends Slavic conceived the noble vampire not a superman seductive and it is rather the version collected by Stoker and romantic, but as a brutal revenants returning from the dead to suck their own relatives or, depending on version to take revenge on the living for their atrocities. The vampire as avenging angel is another facet of the myth very present in this comic. 
But Maruo also uses the vampire in another sense, as a metaphor for all living beings, of any form of life: to be alive, to survive is dirty and take from others, is to be a vampire. Remember that popular tradition has always been related to the infant with a vampire. Voltaire said, for the vampire panic that erupted in Eastern Europe during the eighteenth century, that it was just the result of superstition, and that the only vampires that there were "usurers and businessmen who suck people's blood to daylight, they are not dead although enough corrupt, authentic suckers who do not live in cemeteries, but beautiful palaces. " Marx himself spoke of capitalist society as a purely vampiric society. In the comic of Maruo, the girl protagonist yells "Damn vampire!" To the growing fetus in the womb of her pregnant sister, four bullets below yells at us all. The second main element of Maruo's artistic approach is the ambiguity of his speech. The author is not evident at any time, prefer to create a sensory impact on the reader and allow it to front, ethically and aesthetically, what those bullets will cause. We are not in a comic narrative in the conventional sense where the main objective is "to tell a good story." As Burns comics or in some films of David Lynch, the story and dialogue are minimal, what matters are the images, and above all, feelings and ideas that these images suggest. in the history of the vampire's smile very few verbalized ideas and zero morals, everything is deliberately abstract and ambiguous, the mystery is more important than the conclusions. Scatter over the cartoons contribute to this feeling, of course, but also the high number of pages that tend to have the Japanese artists to recreate their comics climates and environments. There is also a pleasure in Maruo the absurd and twisted irony that reinforce this lack of clear rational discourse, a taste that is linked with surrealism and with the French Grand Guignol and the Theatre of the atrocity. Many of the actions (and crimes) of the players do not follow a clear mobile seem capricious and arbitrary. "The Moon is a satellite ... It is a hole in the sky. And the light you see is the light that filters from the world beyond, "says the boy vampire in the third act of the comic almost irrelevantly. Nor will we find in this comic catharsis on redemptions end blame the Judeo-Christian style, and it seems logical because it comes from an Eastern not a Western. Moreover, the inclusion of a final moral seems antagonistic to something so irrational and amoral as a vampire, a being located beyond good and evil, in any case, what we find is empty and nihilistic view of the world. Near the end of the cartoon, the boy vampire protagonist has already made clear: "You will die all alone and abandoned. (...) It is not a punishment for your sins. But you'll die alone and abandoned. And you'll be forever alone ... "
Paradoxically, despite the absence of a rational course, precisely because of it, vampire's smile conveys many ideas, and that's because the author has been successful. Reading comics, one can not escape the feeling that at this point in the film (the history) should be clear that violence is inherent to human beings, and that cruelty and more or less secret longing to submit to others and to be submitted, too. There are people much more willing than others to cause bad no more reason, especially if the punishment is known social and criminal laws. And there are other people who seem born to be victims, that do not fit in this world who are ostracized by the other without chance of redemption, at any rate, leaving them the revenge against their brutal oppressors or, worse, the betrayal of their Samaritans. A lot of it is in this story of people disliked by others because of their difference, in that weird guy from the Institute started and turned into a vampire by the hand of a female Pygmalion, ugly and hunchbacked. And above all, that girl who is afraid of sex, people and, in general, of life itself, that he secretly wants to suffer and leave this world. Anyway, despite all this elaboration as refined behind the vampire's smile , certainly no shortage of those it released as a product made to bring "free", or directly as obscene, depraved and reprehensible especially now that the right again to roam around Europe and the U.S. (as it has always obsessed not only to suppress crime and conduct inimical to third parties, but also the freedom of manners). One last tip about Maruo's work that is at least unusual and certainly significant, is the fact that its main fans in Japan are high school girls. I'm not sure what to tell us about the psychology of adolescence or female, nor do I dare to speculate. To which I can answer to both questions is more than one would be done to finish reading "The Smile of the Vampire": No, currently there is more volume it, the story ends as it (however, Maruo is already working on the vampire's smile 2 ). YES, will be published in Castilian Maruo more jobs. By Dani speaks barber of Glénat, "Yes, we will draw his strongest material, which shrink and distribute a notice of the contents on the cover." "Mande? ¿¿¿STRONGER THAN THIS?? ---
Seeing del tio berni entry today on Suehiro Maruo Entrecomics I rescued this review THE SMILE OF THE VAMPIRE (Glénat), which originally published in the journal U. No 25 (November 2002 .) In fact, Glénat got much more material Suehiro Maruo, his catalog of abjection in Castilian, here (highly recommended him also THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE ISLAND PANORAMA)
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