Have you ever pondered what it would be like to marry a gorilla? Or to have your deepest desires granted by a satanic genie? Have you ever considered sacrificing your children to culinary aliens, separating your soul from your body, or bioengineering a sex beast? If so, My Gorilla Family is for you!

Comprising fourteen mind-melting stories from the early 1970s, Iijima Ichiro's My Gorilla Family offers an intimate, profoundly humanistic, profoundly disturbing introduction to one of the most bonkers imaginations in the history of Japanese comics.

My Gorilla Family has art and story by Ichiro Iijima. English translation is done by Ryan Holmberg, and lettering by Ryan Holmberg, with Sean Michael Robinson. Published by Living the Line (September 9, 2025). Rated M.

Bolts
Rating:

Reading this collection of short stories felt like I was marathoning episodes of The Twilight Zone at twice the speed. My Gorilla Family is not a long ongoing narrative, but rather a collection of short stories that range from eight to ten pages long on average, with a few of them being multiparters. Almost all these stories deal with some kind of supernatural element, whether it's the occult, body horror, or science fiction, with virtually all of them ending on a depressing note. You could read one story about a woman who explodes into a pile of spiders that planted eggs in her womb, or you could read a story about a woman who shattered into ice because she had sex with a man whose dick was too big. I wish I were kidding about any of this, but if there's one thing I have to give the short stories credit for, it's that they are wildly creative.

The stories definitely rely on shock factor, and although the presentation itself is pretty standard with very basic panel grid layouts, there were moments where I was genuinely shocked on a page's turn. These stories have the pacing of a comic strip, like you would find in a newspaper. This did make it easy to breeze through them very quickly, but comics strips work because you're able to effectively create a setup and a punch line in a small amount of time. These stories barely have a punchline and definitely don't have a setup.

The titular story revolves around a woman who is suddenly living in a world where gorillas are the superior race. The story builds up like it's about to have a genuine twist, but it stops without any real explanation for anything that had gone on. It really did feel like the book is leaning a bit too much on the absurdity of its stories for the sake of maintaining the reader's attention, and the only reason you don't get bored with it is because you immediately jump into the next one.

A lot of them rely on sex, but never in a way that feels exploitative. It's just that almost all of the adults in the stories are incredibly horny. However, that does get into some rather questionable material, but it did feel very off-putting. Thankfully, the book doesn't really show any genitalia. Just bare breasts, but panels are depicting a gorilla man having sex with a distraught woman, and another story involving an adult woman touching herself in the body of a young girl after she just finished drinking a glass of wine and smoking a cigar. Again, I wish I were kidding about any of this. I don't think I could recommend this book because it's too absurd to be genuinely horrifying, but it also has too much disturbing imagery to be considered a comedy. It exists trapped in the perpetual limbo, similar to the one that it often portrays its characters in.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Halfway through reading only the first short story from this horror anthology, I had to put the book down. I was laughing so much. It was the immortal line “Why are there spiders in your pussy?” Why, indeed? Eventually, I was able to control the convulsing laughter, only for most of the stories to also trigger uncontrollable hilarity. This may not have been the original author's intent. Or perhaps it was, and he used lurid horror manga as a smokescreen for his obvious (unintentional?) comedy genius.

Horror comics have come a long way since the early 1970s, so there's something almost whimsically retro about this bonkers collection of unrepentantly bat-shit tall tales. Considering each story's original publication in men's magazines rather than manga anthologies, perhaps it's unsurprising that most pages feature naked women's breasts, explicit sex, and gross-out violence. The men here are all hulking brutes with enormous eyebrows and granite-hewn faces, and the women aren't much prettier.

Presented here are some of the oddest manga shorts I've ever read, ranging from “Women Planet,” where monstrously strong sexbots tear men apart during the act of vigorous copulation, to the two-part “I Dream of Satan” and its deeply gross ending, plus the titular story about a woman learning to love her literal gorilla husband. As her friend explains, “Gorillas are superior to Whites, to Blacks, even to Asians!” I suppose it could be viewed as an anti-racist story, if squinting upside-down through foggy, frosted lenses.

In one story, a woman whose vagina freezes men into solid lumps of ice during coitus receives a dose of her own medicine when “her boss's penis was so big that it turned her body into a veritable glacier.” I mean, I don't even want to try breaking down that bizarre dream logic. Let's not even start with “Freak Species”, a story that attempts to make (normal-sized) man-eating clams seem terrifying, nor the utterly gross “ideal man” genetically manufactured in “Homo Sexualis”. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then by all means rush straight to the store and collect your own brown paper-bag wrapped copy to read alone, sweaty and panting, in the half-light of your squalid, bare-walled bedroom.

For me, I felt like I needed a shower after reading this sex-obsessed, wonky horror smut-fest. While much of the imagery is indeed quite shocking, it's in a nakedly exploitative way, which was likely the intention. It gets an extra star for making me laugh so much, but I'll be glad to never think of any of these stories ever again.