(Hello, before we get into the review, just wanted to bring to your attention that I re-wrote this review in video format on my channel for those that preffer that format. I also extended some points and re-wrote some stuff. If you are not interested, feel free to skip this paragraph and jump into the review, for those that are, you can find it by clicking here, thank you)

I think it was around 2005 or 2006 that I first heard the term "anime". One Piece started airing on Portuguese television, and it claimed to be "the best anime since Dragon Ball", in school all the older kids in my class started talking about this new edgy anime on TV called "Hellsing". And when I got into high school, with everyone obsessing over the Big 3, I finally started to get into the medium, but due to lack of a decent internet connection I ended up opting for a static, black and white version of the stories that everyone was watching. Manga. For people who know me in 2020, I'm a full blown manga fan, one that respects the animated part of this culture, but stays away from it. Over the years I've gotten pretty familiar with the genre, styles and tropes of manga, specially those of Shounen and Seinen. And a year ago, I was finding myself still enjoying the stories the media could tell, but had been well over 5 years since I had one manga that I truly could call a favourite that wasn't written by some of my long time favourite mangaka, Asano and Urasawa.
But then, in January of 2019 I saw a picture of a man in a full body suit and mask with a ghost on his shoulders and this picture was just... so hypnotizing, so grotesque, yet beautiful. It's the kind of thing that I, as a Silent Hill and Alien and whatever fan, love. And in the corner it said the word "Dorohedoro".

This wasn't the first time I heard about this manga, Dorohedoro exists since Q Hayashida started it in 2000, and it was ongoing until September of 2018 and throughout it's run it was always decently famous, culminating earlier this year when it finally got the anime adaptation it deserved. But that was the first time that I REALLY felt like reading it, and I did as soon as possible. I was expecting a gory, horror manga, maybe trippy, with some steampunk elements, and to be fair, Dorohedoro is all of this, but as I found out, it's also much, much more.

To dive in the story of Dorohedoro I should probably start with the setting. Here we have two dimensions, one is The Hole, a horrible, horrible place where humans, like us, live, and the Sorcerer's or Magical User's world where... well... sorcerers live, there's also Hell, where devils live. What makes Dorohedoro amazing from the get go is that the concepts of what is a devil and sorcerer is completely unique to this setting, you never seen anything quite like it. It does things different enough that a manga about "magical users" still manages to feel novel and unique. But this story is about Caiman, Caiman is a human from Hole who has a lizard head which has a human head inside him and to boot, he has amnesia so he is as confused about this plot as you are right now. And we follow him as he tries to figure out why him, out of all people, managed to get stuck with this bizarre head. With him is the ever reliable Nikaido, restaurant owner and overall badass girl who helps him around to try to solve this mystery.
It's early in the story that they talk about a powerful family of sorcerers, called The En Family, ruled by, well... En. Look, the names in the manga are very straightforward.

I was expecting En and his family to just be your run of the mill villains, but then you actually start following them as much as Caiman and Nikaido and I think this when I started noticing the strength of this manga: The characters.
This is my all time favourite cast of characters in any medium, see, you don't get a hero and a villain in here, you get factions, each of them with their unique cast of marvelously and hilariously crafted characters, each of them with their goals, and ambitions and stupid behaviors, but it's not separated that they are great, it's together, it's how they interact with each other that truly makes this worth a read.
You see, Dorohedoro has a depressing, dark and edgy setting, one that is enhanced even more by Q Hayashida's rough, messy and beautiful artstyle. But the characters on the other hand are all incredibly fun and wholesome. They are always having the time of their lives and in return they make me have the time of my life. It's a contrast that should not really work, but Hayashida does it in such a flawless way that it looks so easy to pull off, but I think only her could really write this.

Dorohedoro is a mystery, it's an horror, it's a comedy and it's a slice-of-life with a weird small baseball arc in the middle, and never really feels like the mess it should be. It manages to have a bit of everything for every one and have it done well. It's an experience I never really felt in manga before or after.

If I'm pointed a gun at point-blank and forced to say a negative point to Dorohedoro, I would possibly say that it got dragged a bit, the last arc is around a third of the entire manga. It got extended longer than the author intended for, and I assume that was because it changed magazines near the end twice, and I assume magazines wanted to have it run at least a bit more in their pages, but since things around the mystery of Caiman do get a bit convoluted midway through, the length of this last arc actually helps explain everything in a digestible way that I'm not sure it would have otherwise.

The term genius is thrown a lot to describe some mangaka. Urasawa's thriller manga are definitely works of a genius, and One Piece's Oda has to be one too to write the story he's writing for so long and make it all connect so flawlessly, but Hayashida is a different kind of genius.
Dorohedoro isn't the most complex and well realized thriller mystery, it's not the most complex of worlds either, but Dorohedoro is, to me, the definition of a fun, enjoyable manga.

In my 13 years of watching and reading things in this medium and in my 27 years of being alive and experiencing movies, series, books, comics, games, music, and even wrestling storylines, I didn't expect it to now have the best experience in storytelling ever in my life so far. But I did.
I love manga because of how varied it is, and how much fun and passionate and incredible some stories are, there's manga that makes me feel so much stuff, like happiness, anger, sadness and horror and I love feeling those emotions, but Dorohedoro? Dorohedoro makes me feel ALL of them. This manga is the embodiment of why I love this medium and why I'm so passionate about it.