Octopus Girl, Vol. 2

Octopus Girl #2

by Toru Yamazaki

Now that she has control over her transformations, Takako is happy to be known as the "Octopus Girl"! Being able to change herself into a teenage head with octopus tentacles allows her to discover horrors in the ocean as well as in Japan. Octopus Girl and Sakae (a wicked girl with the body of a moray eel) face satanic cults, pregnancy, death-trap elevators, violent family strife and their own backbiting rivalry! Cutting a crass, comical niche into modern horror manga, Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl serves up the most disgusting dishes of heartbreak and revenge found on land or at sea, and these shocking vignettes will hypnotize fans of the macabre and the absurd!

Genres: Manga, Horror, Comics, Comedy

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[max · Rating 3 out of 5]

they girlbossed tbh!!!

[stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this less than the first volume. The weird shift into sappy stories really kinda gave me whiplash. It’s odd that other stories edge this type of ending before doing something absurd and silly, so it definitely felt off.

[Leila Anani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really enjoyed Octopus girl volume 1, but this one deviates quite heavily from the previous volume. There's not nearly enough Octopus girl action - although she is in it, the main character here is her best friend, snot-nosed, hairy mole faced Sakae - Eel girl. we get 10 short stories featuring the two girls, as they leave the sea and try and fit in in the real world = all with a dark, sting-in-the-tail twist at the end. Stories are a real mixed bag mixing gross out humour with horror, tragedy and just plain bizarre.

Now I love weird, but this one is a little bit too out there for me. It doesn't have the gravitas of Junji Ito for example and the mix of horror and comedy I just found jarring here. Still it is definitely worth a look, especially if you're a horror fan as there are homages to movies such as psycho.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read Octopus Girl Volume 1 I loved it. I thought it was funny, gore-y, and a great "horror" comic. So I naturally had to pick up the second volume. Although it still had a lot of the same humor, and feel as the first, I was disappointed how far it ventured past the whole "octopus" plot lines.

It seemed that the girls were never in the ocean, and were almost always in girl form. And the last comic had nothing to do with the main character's period. Sure it was kind-of a nice nod to older horror comics, but seemed a little pointless to include.

It was still a fun read, though I wonder how much the third book deviates from the original story...