The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

PTSD Radio

What's It About? 

There exists an entity lurking in the shadows. It will grasp victims by their hair and pull them down, down to their death. You can see it out of the corner of your eye, its grasping hands from the streets below or shadows cast on the street. It's unknown whether its a god, a curse, or a psychosis.

PTSD Radio has story and art by Masaaki Nakayama, with English translation by Adam Hirsch and lettering by Pekka Luhtala. Kodansha Comics released the first volume digitally in 2017 and will release its first and second volume as physical omnibus version for the first time on October 18.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

The title of PTSD Radio is a curious choice, since the feeling it most evokes in this first omnibus volume is in fact one of anxiety. True to the 'Radio' part of its name, the jumping around, channel-hopping structure between what can be extremely short chapters serves to drive up the tension, starting with some suspicious activity only to cut off on some sort of snap-shock of frightful imagery. Masaaki Nakayama has a strong sense for singular panel transitions, making every step of our natural reading flow count while knowing just where to stop in order to create an evocative storyline. That last component is important, as while PTSD Radio at first seems to consist only of disjointed short stories sending out waves of unsettling ideas, this collection does eventually start having more clear connections coming together by the time the volume leaves off.

That structure makes this extra-long book nevertheless feel like a brisk, compulsory read. It encompasses the sort of driving, devouring appeal you'd want in horror, asking us to always keep our eyes out for additional details while preying on that attention to make sure we're engaged when the spooky setups are delivered on. Nakayama's understanding of exactly how to pace out the chapters and their rotating viewpoints means that, regardless of the zig-zagging structure, we never really feel like we're lost or trying to remember what a given corner of this spiderweb of a plot was getting up to the last time we checked on them. Once we get a grasp of what the story's about in the abstract—that is, hubris, bad judgment, and the grudges that result—we've already clocked the structural elements connecting everything by a central thread. Or hair, as it were.

Sometimes the structural gimmicks can feel a bit too on-the-nose or self-indulgent. An extra-long interlude chapter speculates on the hair-styled horrors plaguing all the other entries in the book, and bluntly drops the supposition "Could it be that all the stories we've shared are connected in some way?" directly within its dialogue. But it still mostly feels earned at that point, and the 'stories within stories' framing is absolutely the kind of meta-articulation I'm a sucker for. The main issue I take with this first volume of PTSD Radio, amusingly, is that it all ends with a whole lot of those compulsory circles of storytelling left tantalizingly unclosed. And when your chief complaint about an omnibus volume is that it still feels too short, well, I'd say that's one hell of a compliment.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

There's always one book in the manga guide that just makes you feel like you want to switch on every light in your house as you're reading it. PTSD Radio definitely lived up to its name as it left a burning, repetitive imprint on my brain due to its artwork and creative horror. The book is composed of a variety of different ghost stories of people who find their everyday lives plagued by unsettling creatures that seem to target them just because they can. Some stories are definitely more detailed than others in their setup and execution while others are disturbingly quiet, needing only one or two panels to communicate their horror. Because the stories are all so random, it can make the overall book feel a bit disjointed at times, but that also adds to the unpredictability of each story. As such, reading PTSD Radio can feel like walking in a dark hallway knowing full well that there is something in there with you that you cannot see: the idea that you have to face that thing before you reach the end can sometimes be scarier than not knowing there is anything there at all. Definitely a must-read if you are a fan of ghost stories and horror – just don't do what I did and read this book sleep-deprived at 2 o'clock in the morning.