BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga. MADK Vol. 1Story and art: Ryo SuzuriTranslation: Adrienne BeckPublisher: SuBLime MangaRelease Date: February 9, 2021 (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`) CW: Extreme violence and sexuality (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`) Think of the darkest part of yourself. I’m talking about that piece of yourself you’d never share with anyone; the most reprehensible, most messed up, most horrifying, deepest, darkest desire, fantasy or thought. That hidden, terrifying, annihilating fragment of you. MADK is trying to approach that. It’s the most viscerally horrific, disturbing BL manga I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most beautiful. On the surface, MADK‘s premise isn’t far off from your typical manga tropes. Messed up high school boy summons demon and forges a pact that sees him dragged to hell and live as part of a demon prince’s court. Plenty of latitude for some over the top Black Butler-esque gothic darkness, gore and perversion. Within the first 20 pages MADK blows that clean out of the water and jets off into space to find a less boring planet. Preferably with prehensile monster cock. As it turns out, the “sexual kink others would see as disgusting” of high schooler Makoto, as advertised in the synopsis, is his desire to eat someone alive. Not your standard BL fare. Summoning a demon is his compromise with himself. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but he’s always been fascinated by books on serial killers and cannibals; he used to collect roadkill and hide it in his room until he was found out. And then there’s the sexual element of his desire to eat someone alive… He’s terrified his fascination and desires will lead him to doing the unthinkable and he doesn’t see his soul as worth saving, so exchanging it to a demon for the chance to fulfill his fantasy on a non-human, technically non-living entity seems an easy choice. Supremely powerful demon Archduke J’s world is well suited to a monster like Makoto. Oh, sure, it’s an awkward adjustment as his disembodied head is mounted on a dog’s body while waiting for a human one, and then demons clamber to feast on the former human–feast in any meaning imaginable–but his kinks and desires seem tame in comparison to those of demons. And those pale in comparison to the machinations of the demons vying for power, constantly attempting to surpass one another to lord over the rest. In hell, Makoto learns, words and especially names have just as much or more power than physical violence. We’ve established MADK is intensely dark and disturbing, so what makes it a good manga? First of all, Ryo Suzuri’s art is some of the most gorgeous I’ve seen in any manga, taking full advantage of the black and white with masterful contrasting and shading. Often greyscale feels like a limitation with manga–it’s more pleasing to see our favourite beautiful boys in full colour–but in MADK it feels like a feature. The art is lush and expressive, disturbing, of course, but Suzuri has a talent for obscuring some (only some) of the most messed up moments with close ups, blurring or contrast so the reader has to fill in the horrific blanks. There’s a moment close to the start where a… non-standard orifice is created and sodomized. I’ll leave it at that. This is balanced against a compelling world and story. Maybe its because BL is mostly set in mundane locations that we don’t get to see a writer weave a world like MADK‘s hell, but this too is refreshing and masterfully done. The reader learns about hell a