The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Happyland

What's It About? 

The Komiyas are a happy family, with no apparent problems. The parents love each other and are kind to their two children. The kids are brilliant students and in good health. In short, ideal family that has everything they need to be happy!

At least that's what they believed. Until dad decided to take the little tribe to spend a day at Happyland Amusement Park. In this park with deadly attractions, the most shameful secrets will emerge. In Happyland, the curtain caller is Mr. Rabbit, and by the time he's all done, everything will end in tragedy.

Happyland has a story and art by Shingo Honda, with English translation by Alex Kon. This volume was lettered by Vibraant Studio. Published by Ablaze Publishing (November 12, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Carnivals have been a source of horror for a very long time. Whether you learned that from Mikhail Bakhtin, the original Care Bears movie, or any other number of works and critics, the idea of a world where the norms of the everyday world are inverted to create a new world order is ripe for the slashers and killers of horror tales. Happyland is pure schlocky carnivalism: set in a mysterious amusement park deep in a dark, tangled forest, its proprietor, Mr. Bunny, offers free admission and rides to anyone who finds it – but if you don't enjoy the rides as your “true self,” the consequences will be deadly…and only one family will be able to leave the park alive.

The book doesn't hold anything back in terms of horror and gore: heads fly or are cut in half in gruesome detail, fingers are snipped off, and flesh is seared off of bones by boiling acid. The only way to get around these terrible deaths is to blurt out a deep, dark secret for everyone to hear – especially your family. The idea seems to be that you have to survive the rides and your family learns all the ugly things you've been doing behind their backs. Quite frankly, Mr. Bunny seems like he's counting on the latter being the real causes of death, either indirectly (unwillingness to say their secrets) or directly as a result of mandated oversharing. Either way, Mr. Bunny (whose chest hair is the real horror, as far as I'm concerned) is sure to get a good show.

Our protagonists are the Kamiya family, parents Misa and Kenji, and teenage children Ritsu and Rin. Kenji says that he's taking the family out for a “surprise” before they get lost and end up at Happyland, and to be perfectly honest, I get the sense that his “surprise” was a family suicide – and maybe that's the case for everyone at Happyland. If it turns out that they've been dead all along and that the amusement park is hell, I won't be at all shocked, because that feels like the sort of not-twist that this brand of horror enjoys using. This is very much leaning into the idea of horror (gore) rather than terror (psychological), although it makes stabs at being both with the secret angle. Since thus far all of the secrets the Kamiya family has revealed are about sex, it's clear that the creator is more invested in the gruesome angles of the book. That's fine; he does it well. But if slasher isn't your preferred horror flavor, this probably won't work for you.

Happyland is like “What If Spirited Away, But Torture Porn,” and is one of the worst manga I have ever read, I can't even sugar-coat it. The experience of reading it revolted me. Perhaps the worst moment was reaching the end to discover that there was a second volume to come. You couldn't pay me to read it.

Perhaps this genre of horror just isn't for me. No doubt there's someone out there who enjoys base torture porn with no redeeming moral or narrative qualities, who gains fulfillment from witnessing families of adults and children bloodily bisected, beheaded, and generally terrorized by a madman with a bunny head.

While the Komiyas are initially set up to be a normal, loving nuclear family, this is the kind of story that revels in uncovering lurid secrets and emotionally torturing characters who turn out to be much less sympathetic than they first appear. Their tormentor has no appreciable goal, the “rules” of his death game appear arbitrary and vague, and each vile set-piece seems calculated to cause as much suffering as possible. I can't find this entertaining.

Sometimes horror of this nature can be redeemed by humor, but there's nothing funny, or fun, about Happyland. It's relentlessly cynical, grim, and cruel, while the storytelling logic is full of massive holes and stupid twists. The violence is overly exploitative and lurid. While the art is of decent quality, when it's in service to something so empty of value, so stomach-churningly negative, I can't say anything positive about it. If I could have given Happyland a negative grade, I would have. For people who view movies like Saw as the pinnacle of the horror genre only.