Demon Summoner Gash Gash
Manga artist: Conor McCann
Publisher: Strangers Publishing / $25
June 2025
The end of Mason and Matilda is coming. The end is already here and in fact, it has come many times since. After the flood, there was a demon. Once upon a time, the brothers tried to become powerful guardians, but to this day fast forward the indescribable fear, demon summoner gash, gash, and both are like modifications. Mason is still in it, a scum witch, dealing with less evil to fight bigger evil. Matilda works in the service industry and sleeps most nights, so she can’t imagine. Neither are ready for what Conor McCann’s mind has for them: the ascension of Centipede Golgotha.
Of course, it looks like a nightmare manga. Big eyes of Kerubic with a small smile and apple cheeks. The moon where cows jump over. Wide thick limbs and small potato body. Before the Mouse era, a strange and wild day of sweet and painted animation. Only in Bromwich Bay is everyone boiling, with stubble and wrinkled beads and blood sputtering and full of intestinal ropes and ropes. Big hands and bent teeth. Dancing shadows. Everything is very dark. There is so much black ink on every page, not only crowded around the panels, but there is also a small amount of light that flows into them, and these goofy little witches fight.
Gouache is a cartoon horror of Frank Kojik combination, Saturday morning sunshine, and cutting of the organs. Industrial music, post-hardcore, grunge, heavy metal, album covers, concert posters and shared spaces. McCann’s stacked up JTHM, what a manga! Art beneath the giant text. This page evokes the shaped prints of print aesthetics, but also illuminates lettering in a way that makes EC comics proud. Chrisware and his stylized title card. Demon Summoner Gash Gash is reminiscent of Golden Age horror comics and the Gothic romantic Grand Guignolle that announces the subversion of innocence in industrial music and culture art.
The back cover for The Strangers Publishing Edition – a part of the same release slate as the hanging – cites Go Nagai as influenced by Nagai (and Cormac McCarthy and Gummo). Something like Centipede Golgotha, I can see it. I actually really love Scum Witch’s outfit. Mason is somewhat of a Grendel and a Supercenti. Matilda’s mask makes me think of the paradise phantom. But all this gives a bit of weight to the idea that character design is important and is a hero story. Check out the devils who run pawn shops. The prosthetic head may be empty, but some of him are all under the table, anywhere in the shadows. More insects are his children. The flooded hell town was pleasantly quirky before ruin. Now, what’s not stolen is covered in depression. All other residents appear to have eyes hanging from the socket. You can imagine a local karaoke bar.
Even in hell, the family lasts. With nothing in the pub’s grab bound by a belly-saving dumpster, you can’t properly face the apocalypse. Do you have the devil’s debt in your head, in your head, to get out of the normal modern debt, starting with cutting your fingers and only getting worse? Honestly, I read a comic book that is hardly believable. Poverty and despair, family and sacrifice, these are themes that run through the book and appear in many ways. It’s subtext, and sometimes text, but no bindings either. Is Demon Summoner Gash Gash anti-violence? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Rather than McCann sew it for us, the reader is someone who reconciles the actions they take, the world they live in, the world they live in.
Despite the inconceivable fear, I found myself drawn into the conversation due to their familiarity. Matilda (although it’s time to stall) is a toxic narcissist who takes over the stress of debt and feels he is drowning, turning it into a dog and giving dog food that he makes himself discusses without listening to the self-affirmation of his high-tech peers. In contrast to the child-like practices of art, rather than plaguing the darkness of the world, Goldkey goes for the gosh gosh gosh. Consider whether you need the eloquence of expression from a sleazy story.
McCann achieves what so many illustrators, cartoonists and game creators work very hard. Cute gloss. Beautiful ug. Unfamiliar nostalgia. More than that, the practices involving Gash Gash exist within the broader intent of storytelling from McCann. Pastishes can become the fence surrounding the possibilities of the story. Gash gosh offers the mythical thrill that follows the path and ranks rank and Raglan promises, but is greater than ending with something as easy as a victory. A violent conflict should be expected. It happens every day to almost every resident of this cursed, flooded pit. What makes the brawl different from the rest?
Demon Summoner Gash Gash answers the finality of death with the unpredictable strangeness of life. Life is a constantly fighting, a wonderful disaster, and despite the way it is sank into blood, it is the aspect that Scumwich fights. It is sacred violence in honor of martialism. You have a contradiction. Still, James Ober is a crow. It’s about revenge, dying with something that causes suffering beyond suffering, losing someone, wanting to protect them, feeling like a failure, and being drawn into your worst behavior despite your intentions.
It’s not about physical suffering. In other words, that’s right. O’Barr was suffering from physical pain, a stiff muscled chest, bends and bullets. Each crying wound leaves a crow behind. Gosh gosh is more flooded, and the body is analysed whimsically to break the monotony of joining the mountains. What’s shocking is what the body can withstand over time, normalizing atrocities and cutting is the currency. Living through it is easier than living with it.
So it’s not that your body is suffering. Gash Gash is torture spirits. Scum Witch continues to live despite a pound of meat being sold. The suffering can endure. This is about Matilda and Mason being “the infinite twins of love and fear,” and about pain deeper than the loss of their limbs. Violence and aesthetic, and even the circumstances can be absurd. There is no mercy for them. Who is not trapped in a terrible conversation while you run errands? But feeling these people, it will bother you.
Demon Summoner Gash Gash is published by Strangers Publishing.
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