The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Drip Drip

What's It About? 

Whenever Mako Higari comes in contact with something she perceives as dirty, she gets a massive nosebleed. How can she find a loving partner and commit to a meaningful intimate relationship when just touching another person makes her bleed out? Especially when most of the men she meets are sleazy creeps! Her first challenge might be learning to love herself… Plus, a short story starring Santa Claus as we've never seen him before! (from Viz)

Drip Drip has story and art by Paru Itagaki, with English translation by Tomo Kimura, and Viz will release the single-volume manga both digitally and physically on October 18.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

There's a statement of intent to a manga that opens with a girl willingly plunging face-first into a trash can. But the works of Paru Itagaki are the kind of good garbage that make BEASTARS such a memorably wild ride, and she's here with another one of those in Drip Drip: depicting one Mako Higari's heartening, desperately disgusting quest to get laid. The inherent messiness of the human condition is portrayed with all the literal messiness that can communicate the kinds of feelings that would make you want to expel all the blood out of your body. As extreme as the manner in which Mako's condition is depicted, it succeeds at capturing that particular vibe so relatable to anyone who's ever struggled with closeness: the idea that there's just something fundamentally wrong which can repel any instances of intimacy at a given moment.

It's a solid emotional base for a single-volume story that has plenty else going on. Itagaki clearly had a ton she wanted to get out of her system here, turning Drip Drip into a layered story about generational trauma, the societal norms we seek for ourselves, and how that intersects with things like fetishism and our individual approaches to attraction and fulfillment. There's a lot here, and there's an honesty about all of it that turns it into a surprisingly appealing, almost easy read in spite of the regularly grody depiction of the subject matter. It's kind of impressive that, despite our heroine regularly spending time in the story naked and covered in blood, or even being actively exploited later on, the tone never feels overly exploitative; instead, it comes across as a regularly raw view of the kind of uneven journey of ongoing self-discovery that necessarily can't come to an easy, fairy-tale conclusion. You simply have to bleed as much as you can along the way while still searching.

Itagaki's art carries Drip Drip in her signature style, bringing the same cartoony sensibilities to human characters that we all know and love her animal-people for. And her inky approach to tones makes this story and all its streaks and splotches of black blood on the page a perfect fit for her style. The story being told can get especially blunt in a couple places, including a point where our heroine just directly spells out "This was all about generational trauma!", but it's the sort of bluntness I think is warranted in a story like this, alongside some of the fundamentally alien manners in which these otherwise-understandable feelings are being expressed. There is a sense of watching someone work through hypothetical hang-ups about sex in real-time, leading to story-shifting sharp swerves, but it still all feels earned by the time it does reach a stopping point. And it does that with insane final escalations accompanied by some wildly indulgent art. I also have to shout out the one-shot story included at the end of this volume, itself a gloriously absurd little piece of extra material. It's the sort of window into an author's odd, indulgent proclivities that I love in art, and makes Drip Drip recommendable as the best kind of compelling curiosity.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

I have to hand it to Paru Itagaki: no one draws the internalized sexual angst of people who feel marginalized quite like she does. If BEASTARS can be read as a metaphor for the carnivore/herbivore terms' sexual meaning in Japan, then Drip Drip takes on the ideas that women are force-fed as they're socially conditioned: sex is dirty and if you have sex, you're filthy too. Not that everyone is told that or that they believe it, but as someone socially conditioned as female, I can tell you that I heard that message a lot, even though my parents never passed it on or agreed with it.

In the case of Mako Higari, the protagonist of this one-volume story, her mother passed the message on after she caught her husband cheating on her. After she discovered his infidelity, she became a devout worshipper at the Church of Disinfectants, buying cartons of the stuff and telling her daughter daily how dirty humans and everything they touch are. Mako internalized this in an extreme way, and by the time we meet her, every single time she attempts to do something her mother warned her was “filthy,” blood geysers from her nose. She's convinced that if she ever finds her one true love she'll be able to have sex with them without bleeding to death, but so far she hasn't had any luck…and when she finally does, it's not because she's finally found Mr. Right, but more because he's able to say the right things to circumvent her mother's conditioning.

At its core, Drip Drip is equal parts about accepting yourself as who your parents made you become and realizing that maybe there's more to life than phobias and fairy tales. Mako may never really get over what her mother did to her, but she's able to accept herself by the end of the book, and maybe that's the real first step for her, because trying to go directly against her conditioning was the equivalent of jumping off a cliff with an umbrella and expecting to fly. It's a deeply bizarre book, but if you aren't grossed out by blood (and there is a lot of blood in this book, along with detailed female nudity) and you liked BEASTARS, I'd definitely suggest checking it out. And hey, there's a weird short story in the back about Santa and a sex worker, so why not give this a go?