As we all know, series that choose to explore dark subject matter and have a very out-there artstyle or general aesthetic can be a mixed bag. Either you get something emotionally touching that makes you say "to think an author dared to touch upon this so tastefully...!", or you wonder how come the creator hasn't gone to jail or gotten mercilessly bullied off the internet yet.

Thankfully, this series falls into the former category. Despite all the body horror, occasional gore and lots of fetal imagery, at its core, it's a story of two oddballs with sad backstories (a seemingly immortal little girl who knows not of concepts like family or parents and a freaky humanoid that eats just about anything and can make one piece of bread appear out of thin air everyday) wandering through a weird, oftentimes cruel world in pursuit of, as it turns out almost right away, the same person.

In this setting, people can become wizards and wield unimaginable power, but there's a catch - no matter how kind their intentions are, their form will be warped in some way. They get extra eyes, morph into giant bugs, become deer with several extra human heads as antlers...you name it. No two wizard designs the author came up with are the same and they're each delightfully strange in their own ways. I especially loved the design of a flower-themed witch whose visor-like petals regularly wither, revealing a grotesque array of extra eyes unless she consumes strange eggs provided by another, similarly freaky magic user.

The art in this manga is a rare case of where, at least in my opinion, it keeps getting better the longer the series goes on. Not only do you get the aforementioned strange wizards and delightfully freaky residents of various cities and villages our protagonists visit along the way, but the cities themselves look plenty freaky themselves, too; regardless if they're a strange circus or mostly empty fields and deserts, each location featured within has a uniquely bizarre charm that keeps you guessing what's next. A lot of it feels very picture-book-esque, too; despite how morbid the world can get, it still has this dreamy feel that fills you with childlike curiosity of its residents and architecture alike.

Best I can describe some of the manga's locations is a mix between places you'd see in either American McGee's Alice game, the classic RPGmaker game OFF and trinkets found on illustrations by the relatively obscure yet insanely talented author/artist Walter Moers (most notable for his Zamonien book series). If you liked any of these things years ago (or got into them recently - delighted if you did even in the 2020s!) or are like me and your sense of aesthetics is stuck around 2009-ish safe-edgy media, I think this will be up your lane.

Without delving into too many spoilers and briefly coming back to what I said in the first paragraph - I also thought it was interesting how the author decided to handle a character that's very, very strongly implied to be a pedophile, as well as exploring why their victims were hesitant to escape them and allowed their abuse to continue. I don't want to spoil their arc, but I'll say this - I think it's impressive when an author crafts a character that's both extremely loathsome and weirdly pitiful at the same time, while putting a lot of emphasis on how warped a person can get when someone with a certain kind of power over them plays too much of a role in their life. And seeing how said person with power ends up as a direct result of their own actions felt strangely cathartic.

Additionally, this is also borderline spoiler territory, but what the author tried to say about how our cravings influence our lives was pretty thought-provoking, too. I don't find myself genuinely pondering some sort of deeper philosophical conundrum after reading a manga with funny monsters in it, yet this one certainly has me doing that - and, best of all, the way the author slips in this underlying food for thought is very non-banal. Undoubtedly a side effect of how wonderfully show-don't-tell the manga gets at times! Quite a few big reveals are given to you by actually seeing what happened rather than having the characters infodump for a whole page. A dying art in manga these days...

Summarizing - if you'd like to read a beautifully drawn manga with some morbid visuals yet a surprisingly cute story with lots of show-don't-tell and the best kind of dumb humour here and there, this is perfect for you.