Dorohedoro Review

Nothing else looks like Dorohedoro. Hayashida draws a rotting industrial city and the sorcerers' parallel world with an obsessive, filthy detail, all cracked tiles and exposed pipes and mushrooms growing where they should not, and populates it with a cast whose faces are hidden behind masks or replaced by animal heads. The violence is extreme and constantly undercut by domestic comedy: the sorcerers who are the villains are also a found family who cook together, and the hero's partner Nikaido runs a restaurant.

The story is an amnesia mystery that takes eighteen years to unravel and does so with a surprising, coherent answer. The world building is the achievement, an entire ecology of magic, smoke, devils and corpses that feels lived in rather than designed. It is too grotesque for many readers and too odd to recommend blindly, and it is one of the most original works the medium has produced.