★★★★★ 5
"She was dead when I got there," Mom casually said
Format: Paperback
I've faithfully followed Living the Line's Smudge manga releases up to this. Actually I had this one preordered for ages but Amazon never shipped it to me and I only noticed it was in stock by chance. I had to cancel and reorder it. What the heck, Amazon?
Anyhow, it's definitely a horror story but also a species of superhero story, or at least a person-with-superpowers story, without the encumbrances of lore, heavy character- or world-building, a continuing narrative in a shared universe, or anything else. There's really nothing you could call a plot. Stripped down and even rough as it is, it's utterly engrossing, surreal reading for me.
A lot of my manga reading is horror but I've also been enjoying superhero manga like this or, for example, Hikari-Man FAR more than anything from the Big Two because of the greater freedom the Japanese works exhibit in how they conceptualize power(s) and heroism.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2026
