Sabato Obiga is a hapless teen boy who wants desperately to have a girlfriend, but every time he brings a girl home, his flamboyant and eccentric family frightens her away with their macabre sensibilities and odd behavior. It's not that his parents and his twin sisters,
Lisa & Misa, don't love him, but they keep interfering in his life, and as far as Sabato (his name means "Sabbath") can tell, they're deliberately chasing his potential girlfriends away. They seemingly want him to be miserable, and they revel in that misery. Sabato's friend,
Zuzuki, thinks that Sabato is his own worst enemy, and he may be right. There could be more to the Obigas' torment than meets the eye…
Billed as the "Goth Loli Queen" (Gothic Lolita),
Mitsukazu Mihara is the master of the Manga short story - what Americans consider a "graphic novel" - as each of her stories can be collected in one volume. Her latest Manga,
Haunted House, can be described for American audiences in terms of a high concept. What if the Addams Family (either the Charles Addams' original or the 1960's TV show adaptation) had a teenaged son? What if, unlike the rest of the Addams Family, that son were normal? What would happen when he tried to bring his normal life from the outside world into his family's home? Granted, the Obigas of Haunted House are more gruesome and macabre than the "The Addams Family" or even "The Munsters," but this comparison will do.
Death, funerals, graveyards, and the afterlife permeate Mihara's work, but her ornate art, with it heavy emphasis on spotting blacks, makes her Manga (
The Embalmer,
R.I.P.: Requiem in Phonybrian) a tad bit less morbid and ghoulish than, say, watching a mortician at work. Personally, I'm not a big fan of her Manga, but readers that are into Goth comics and cosplay may dig this.
5/10
