地獄変

JIGOKUHEN

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
1
RELEASE
June 6, 1984
CHAPTERS
14

DESCRIPTION

Panorama of Hell is a shocking, tortuous journey into the depths of one man's postnuclear Hell. Through the confessions of a fiendish Hell painter born in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, Hideshi Hino tells a nightmarish story, creating a manga masterpiece of black humor, stunning vision, and unflinching imagery.

(Source: Blast Books)

CHAPTERS

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MANGA HorrorHino Hideshi Best Works

REVIEWS

TheGruesomeGoblin
75/100
How meta of Hideshi Hino. This manga's literally a Panorama of Hell...

Starting out your horror manga immediately with a close-up of a face like that is a pretty good move...

A 1983 horror manga by Hideshi Hino, the Panorama of Hell was a kind of shocking read. As I of course did not know all the background information what with everything Hideshi Hino went through in his real life.

I started reading this and I was immediately met with a very strange and immediately off-putting painter character talking about how he's started work on his magnum opus. The Panorama of Hell.

And to paint it, he's willing to drink hydrochloric acid because after all, he does all of his paintings in blood...

I figured it was just going to be your typical horror manga. I actually even thought it had a pretty good set-up. A painter looking to paint paintings of hell is obviously on the look out for just absolute horrible scenes of gore and just humanity being awful... hence, he's going to be telling the reader horror stories.

And for a while, that's pretty much all this manga is. Our painter friend shows us around his house, introduces us to his family, points outside to where the guillotine is located and the local beheadings happen...

"That's pretty cool, right? I love watching these as I paint!"

Horror's supposed to disturb. It's supposed to make you uneasy. Gross you out or disgust you. And to give credit where credit is due to Hideshi Hino, it's been a while since I've so quickly felt uneasy towards a character in a horror manga. Or rather towards the whole setting. Why the fuck are there fireworks going off to accompany beheadings? Or rather, why is happening right outside of the guy's house?

Is this whole thing literally taking place in Hell itself???

~~Probably.~~

I've always been of the opinion that if your horror manga's entire purpose is going to be gore and just being as disgusting as possible, you really gotta go for it. And holy shit does Hideshi Hino go for it.

There's just so much gore and awfulness.

The stand out example that I will probably remember forever being the Hell Tavern where the painter's wife works. All of her customers are the recently dead who had their heads chopped off by the guillotine. But oh no, how are they going to eat their meals! ~~Which is just their own severed flesh.~~ They have no heads which means they have no mouths!

That's okay. The matron of this place will just cut a nice little hole in each of their necks. Now they have mouths again!

Not gonna lie, I kind of legitimately cringed. You can show me dozens of drawings of people getting beheaded at the guillotine and it's nothing. But cutting a hole in a throat... let alone, they're already headless corpses...

Genuinely was unpleasant to see. Which was nice.

And then... then we get to the real shit.

This is not the first time I've read a horror manga and it suddenly incorporated World War II into it. But as I mentioned at the start, this part sort of also takes on an autobiographical tone to it because Hideshi Hino and his family really did flee Manchuria.

Plus, the stuff about his grandfather and father... hell, when you get down to it, all of this crazy ass gore and fucked up shit is coming directly right out of Hideshi Hino's head.

The man may as well as be the painter character himself~~--oh, now I get it.~~

This is really when this manga fully seized my interest. Don't get me wrong, the over the top depictions of Hell and gore early on were fun but... the painter literally sculpts a statue of the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima and douses it in blood and starts praying to it for misfortune to happen.

And the painter himself said that he believes the mushroom cloud to be his true father because as it was rising it sent a light bolt over to Manchuria to cause his mother to have an immaculate conception.

Holy shit.

I actually became really fond of the Hell Painter character. He's just so unbelievably evil and crazy. The ultimate hell painting he decides he wants to see is

total nuclear armageddon. And to achieve it, he's willing to sacrifice his entire family.

This man's insanity is so powerful that he transcends the boundaries of the manga itself to attempt to murder the readers. When the axe suddenly came out of the page and almost went right into my face, I freaked the fuck out.

But no seriously, I can only feel respect for Hideshi Hino for having the gall to even attempt this sort of ending. Because the character has just completely and utterly descended into insanity I was genuinely invested in what he was saying and then all of a sudden he turns around and looks at us. The reader.

Like the character is literally saying everybody who reads Hideshi Hino's manga is going to die.

I love this. I love everything about this. More horror manga need this sort of energy.

Conclusion

I can't say Hideshi Hino is my favorite horror mangaka, but I'm definitely warming up to him.

This manga has one of the best endings for a horror manga I've seen in quite a while. It's a sufficiently gory and horrible depiction of Hell ~~whether or not that's actually where the manga actually is supposed to take place.~~ And to top it all off, you have the autobiographical angle to it and while I'm sure some of it was exaggerated...

The guy definitely is a rightful owner of a "yeah that's why I do horror" card.

I give the Panorama of Hell a 7.5 out of 10 or 75 out of 100.

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gambitmay
97/100
Over 40 years after its creation, Panorama of Hell is more relevant than ever.
"When it came time to head home, everything had already become a living hell!" says one character in Hideshi Hino's Panorama of Hell, as he continues "Hmph! What goes around always comes around... It's all one big never-ending cycle of war! It's hell... This life is nothing but a living hell!"
This one quote truly caught me off guard. In the last few years, we've been seeing so many horrors that are beyond comprehension. Wars, genocides, massacres. And it's all still going. As the horrors of reality seem to go far beyond imagination, how can a fictional work still be terrifying? How are we supposed to be disturbed by fictional works when the reality is much more disturbing?
That's why Hino's Panorama of Hell caught me so off guard. This horror manga is not a work of fiction. Rather, it is a direct reflection on the time we are currently living in. While this manga was written over 40 years ago, it captures the same horrors we are seeing today, and in a world of "never again", where the horrors of World War and genocide are occurring once again, this work is more relevant than ever.

This manga tells the story of an artist who is painting his masterpiece 'panorama of hell', and starts a conversation with the reader, telling the reader about his life, his family, and the town he lives in. It's as grotesque as it can get - people are being beheaded to the sound of fireworks, their beheaded corpses come to life searching for their heads, which have been thrown into a bottomless river of blood. This is just a small glimpse of the world where Panorama of Hell takes place.
And still, this world isn't imaginary. It's the same world we are living in. The bottomless river of blood is just outside of our own homes. The beheaded corpses are roaming outside as you read this, looking for their heads to no avail. This work was not made for shock value, but rather as a reflection, as a window to the reality outside that we have been ignoring.

Being based on Hino's own experiences growing up in post-war Japan, it's no surprise this work captures the horrors of the world in such an authentic and genuine way. It's impossible to ignore the parallels between Hino and the main character, and trying to understand where they end. In that sense, it reminds me of Yoshiharu Tsuge's semi autobiographical works about post-war Japan, and this work acts as a spiritual successor to the legacy of gekiga.
That quote is more relevant than ever. Yes, "It's hell... This life is nothing but a living hell!" It truly is nothing but a living hell. That's why this manga is like nothing else. It's more real than reality itself. With his simple yet extremely detailed penwork, Hino captures hell - and shows us that it's none other than the world we are currently living in. It's edgy, it's grotesque, it's disturbing - but more than anything, it's painfully real.
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