Dorohedoro vol 1 by Q. Hayashida

Caiman and Nikaido live in The Hole, a place where sorcerers go to practice magic on unsuspecting humans. Caiman has his head transformed into that of a lizard, and now he and Nikaido are trying to track down the sorcerer who did it. If they can kill him, the spell will be reversed, and Caiman will go back to normal. Nikaido also runs an eatery called The Hungry Bug, and Caiman works for a doctor’s office specializing in helping the victims of sorcerers. In this way, both gather leads on sorcerers working around The Hole so they can track them down. En, the head of the sorcerers, is also looking for the sorcerer who changed Caiman, but he still had to do something to stop Caiman and Nikaido from killing sorcerers. He sends in a team of “fixers, the ones who usually cleans up messes, to deal with Caiman and Nikaido.

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This story, while it involves magic and sorcerers and curses, is anything but a childhood fairytale. Caiman is a serious guy when it comes to killing sorcerers, and he’s definitely not shy about making them suffer as he extracts information out of them. The sorcerers are unfeeling about their victims, claiming that since they live in The Hole, their lives are already terrible, and they are there for being experimented on. Caiman does have a fondness for gyoza that gives the story a lighthearted break every now and then. While the premise and world built up in the first volume is interesting, there is some pretty excessive violence and gore that didn't jive with me (probably part of the point though).

The illustrations employ very dark, jagged lines, feeding into the creepiness of the overall story.

VIZ rates this for mature for violence, gore, smoking and alcohol use, and frontal female nudity from the waste up.

Sara’s Rating: 7/10
Suitability Level: Adult

Publisher: VIZ Media
Publication Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 9781421533636 (Paperback)

​Tags: Rating: 7/10, Suitability: Adult, Manga, Magic, VIZ Media