posted on by Crystalyn Hodgkins
Ryan Holmberg to translate manga featuring 14 stories
© Taro Bonten
Translator Ryan Holmberg announced on Instagram on Thursday that publisher Living the Line has licensed Taro Bonten’s Face Meat manga for its horror imprint Smudge. Holmberg is translating the manga.
The manga’s listing on Barnes & Noble describes the manga:
A headless busty blonde, a face-stealing psychopath, a sleazy serial killer sculptor, a horny handsome Igor, a cuckold caterpillar man, a torturous daydream into the pits of hell. Welcome to the raunchy and gristly world of FACE MEAT, from the decadent imagination of outlaw polymath Bonten Taro—ex-kamikaze, ex-yakuza, singer, songwriter, actor, world-famous tattooist, husband of seven, and underappreciated pioneer of “pinky violence” femme fatales and adult horror manga.
While Mizuki Shigeru and Umezz Kazuo were paving the way for horror in shonen and shojo magazines in the 1960s, Bonten was secretly doing the same in erotic men’s rags—and the results are as trashy as you’d expect. With an essay by Bonten booster and B-gekiga expert Kunisawa Hiroshi, FACE MEAT includes fourteen hair- and pants-raising stories that have never been assembled before under a single cover in any language!
Holmberg stated the projected release date for the manga is May 2025. The manga will be the fourth release from Smudge.
Living the Line describes Smudge as “a line of classic pulp, horror, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated into English by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.” Norikazu Kawashima‘s Her Frankenstein was the first title under the imprint. Other titles in the imprint include Marina Shirakawa‘s UFO Mushroom Invasion (Shinryaku Enban Kinokonga) manga and Shinichi Koga‘s Mansect (Yо̄chū).
Source: Ryan Holmberg‘s Instagram account