Human Clock

“Papa, mama, please don’t be surprised. A year ago, my organs were replaced with gears and springs…”

Tadashi is the lone son of a watchmaker. Clocks are his only friends. Ever since a nightmarish bicycle accident, he fears going to school. So, his parents hire him a special tutor—not a man, but a mustachioed pocket watch. He, too, fails to improve Tadashi’s grades, though gifts him a magical wristwatch capable of transporting its wearer to a frighteningly surreal land of clock people. As the automatons begin to turn on their makers, Tadashi decides that it’s best to abandon his uneasy humanity and bestow his soul to the ticktocks.

Originally published in 1962, Tokunami Seiichiro’s HUMAN CLOCK has no peer or parallel in manga history. Years before it was acceptable to be abstract and oneiric in Japanese comics, years before it was common to cartoon in an artistic manner that privileged form over function, Tokunami was expressionistically slashing through panels in a Kafka-esque fever dream of jagged and melting imagery. Including an equally weird second story, THE CAT’S MOURNING CLOTHES, and an essay by subculturalist Udagawa Takeo, HUMAN CLOCK is the ninth volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg and published by Living the Line.