Papa, Mama...please watch over me. With these two hands, I'll avenge you...!Once upon a time, a happy, cheerful village full of loving, joyous mushrooms lived deep in the forest. Everything was wonderful and splendid and bright―until the day he came. Bringing death and destruction wherever he went, the malignant, miasmic mushroom massacred the entire village for no apparent reason. And so began our heroine's journey to bring about the foul fungus's demise…

Toxy Noxy Foresty Forest has story and art by Noboru Segawa. English translation is done by Amanda Haley and lettering by Aila Nagamine. Published by Yen Press (May 26, 2026). Rated OT.

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Do not let the cartoony mushroom character designs fool you, this story is dark as hell. I probably winced at the page more so than any other story on this guide. A story about cute anamorphic mushrooms living in a forest sounds nice right? What happens when some of them are constantly trying to kill themselves, brutally destroy each other for twisted ends and are tormented by existential feelings of identity with regards to how dangerous they are? That is the type of story that we are dealing with here, folks, and if you can stomach that type of dark humor, then oh boy are you in for a treat. I can't even blame the volume for seemingly being duplicitous in nature because I kind of love stories like this.

Contrast is always a great method for invoking strong emotional reactions in manga or comics. If you have something innocent and present it in a brutal way, that weirdly makes it more real to me because it shows that nothing is truly safe out there. I don't mean this in a nihilistic way, but more so in the sense that you can't always judge a book by its cover and sometimes that presentation can get to the heart of really twisted issues better than something that was maybe drawn in a hyper realistic way. It's hard to say what the overall message of the story is as much as it is just introducing different characters who present a lot of the affirmation ideas that I mentioned.

The protagonist is a young mushroom out for revenge, but they're learning more about how twisted this forest really is. What's real and what isn't or what is worth fighting for versus what is worth leaving behind are constantly on their mind. The main character is a little bit annoying, but considering that they are very child coded, that's probably why and this does give a lot of hints about being a sort of dark coming of age story. It's about confronting a lot of those dark twisted things even if you might also be a part of it, which can also be seen as a metaphor for the existence of fungus in the first place. I genuinely don't know what direction the story is going in, and I mean that in a positive way, because while a lot of the chapters seem to be about introducing new characters that introduce new societal ideas revolving around poisonous mushrooms, societal pressures, and surviving in an overly bleak world, the overall direction of the story is going in is a little bit unclear. There's definitely a goal, but how that goal ends up being realized given the factors that are introduced is perplexing.

Having a toxic mushroom companion who is constantly trying to kill himself as a running gag was weirdly funny and having a fly that acted as the animal companion was also weirdly endearing. I love the designs of all of the different mushrooms with more exaggerated features which also made their brutal ends hit that much harder. If you're a fan of dark stories told from the perspective of cute magical characters, then definitely give this one a shot because it really fulfills that niche in spades. Bonus points if you just happen to really, really like mushrooms like my boss does.