i only read about 4 volumes of dorohedoro before falling off, because it's honestly a little difficult to get through. q hayashida's dark, grimy inks function kind of like a rorschach test; you're never quite sure what you're seeing in those scratchy shadows. the black and white manga art makes the already hyperviolent world almost stomach-churningly grotesque, as your brain works on overdrive to fill in all the blood and gore. not to say it's bad! dorohedoro is going for something really specific here and it fucking nails it. it's just that i'm the kind of bitch who needs a month between reading volumes and sometimes that means i forget i'm reading a series.

i was worried the show wasn't going to capture the filthy, disgusting art but good news y'all, they did it. the hole and the sorceror's world rightly look like places that will never ever be clean, no matter how hard you scrub, and the garish colors serve to make everything seem that much more surreal. usually noticeable cgi in anime looks bad, but here it just emphasizes how fucked up and weird everything is. this show exists entirely in an uncanny, repulsive valley.

other things dorohedoro does well: the mystery at the center is truly mysterious, q hayashida somehow manages to make you root for both factions, the violence is punctuated by true laugh-out-loud jokes, and there's a baseball episode. hannibal could never.