The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Gahi-chan!

What's It About? 

When a starving manga artist suddenly finds a girl who looks like the spitting image of his own series' heroine on his front doorstep, it seems like a dream come true. But if only it was as simple as his drawings coming to life—this girl turns out to actually be a gahi, a yokai who can only appear human by transforming artwork into human skin and wearing it like a glove.

Gahi-chan! has story and art by Tirotata, with English translation by Sheldon Drzka and lettering by Arbash Mughal, and Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically on October 4

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Sure, you can easily tell from the cover that Gahi-chan! is a horny manga, but if you're unprepared for the specific kind of horny, don't worry, as that manifests within the first ten pages. This series is on layers of fetishes; it's serving up a hearty plate of fetishini alfredo here. We begin with a tentacle-monster girl wearing a meticulously-rendered skin-suit, and only slide into deeper, weirder crevasses from there. It's upfront about its indulgences, anyway. Creator Tirotata has constructed something that works to illustrate the appeals of his personal fetishes (the confirmation of this in the author's notes can only prompt the reaction of a surprised-Pikachu "No, really?") alongside selling this as specific to appreciation for the craft of manga itself. It's a real horny manga artist's horny manga, if that makes any sense; the sort of story where the not-at-all self-insert author at the center of all this cumbrained chaos will loudly shout his preference for "a young wife with huge tits and a loose side ponytail". That kind of open, honest perversion I think I can respect.

For a manga predicated entirely on extremely specific appeals, how well does the art carry all that? Those salacious skin-suits at least stand out for the sheer amount of effort being put in rendering them, even if they are not to your particular tastes, with detailed meaty interiors that reminded me of nothing so much as select scenes from Gleipnir. I've taken in enough mucousy monster-girl manga (purely for academic reasons of course) that this detailing didn't squick me even if it didn't blow my specific skirt up either, though I suspect that overall it'll serve as a solid tit-mus test for readers finding out if it's a stretch too far or exactly the sort of thing they've been looking to try on. Generally speaking, the artist's otherwise 'normal' predilection for huge honkers sometimes overshadows every other fanservice element being rendered here, as main girl Ruki's anatomy can be all over the place, particularly depending on how her arms get positioned around her colossal cans. But I guess you can hand-wave oddities like that thanks to the narrative around what she actually is and all.

This book does still have a few regular punchlines that land among all the squishy setpieces. It's almost refreshing to see a series do the "Bust down the door when it sounds like something horny is happening on the other side" gag to reveal an actual sexy setpiece, rather than a benign anticlimax, misunderstanding as it still is. That's the power of the perverse priorities at play here, that even as Gahi-chan! adds a more momentous plot in places, it somehow gives way to setups even more terminally horny than those opening episodic escapades. There are some oddities, like how Ruki's knowledge of sexual elements seems to shift based on whatever's most funny/horny at the time, or the writing's attempts to pour out pathos at one point for what are otherwise purely perverse props. But at least that shows that Tirotata recognizes the power of characterization in rendering this kind of silly specific spank-bank appeal, and you can't accuse him of playing coy with his content.

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Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

It's nice to be reminded of how refreshing a simple, low-brow magical girlfriend manga can be. Gahi-chan! isn't very deep, but it's hard to deny how unrelentingly fun it can be. Nekotarō does a good job skirting the line between the hapless underdog dealing with the chaos around him and the skeevy perv who's enjoying the attention, and Ruki is good at being energetic and destructive without being utterly annoying. I wish the same could be said of her sister, Moru, who's just an annoying half-pint. Lots of cheeky attention is given to Ruki's penchant for giving her human forms big, bulbous breasts, but I wish the series wouldn't lean into how young Ruki is supposed to look otherwise. It's also a bit offputting when the series shows the even-younger-looking Moru or gender-swapped Nekotarō getting felt up.

There's also the ongoing matter that the mangaka Tirotata has a “skin” fetish; lots of panels deal with the gahi in this story donning their “human” skins (or having their skins ripped off, or having their monstrous selves ripping through their skin). I can see that being a bit too disturbing for some readers looking for a light-hearted sexy romp. The art and anatomy is kinda loose (boobs don't work that way), but Gahi-chan! is still fun enough to excuse most of its downside. Lightly recommended.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

I'm personally not a big fan of vore, and if you are turned off by the idea of a tentacle-like creature wearing a very detailed human skin, then you might find Gahi-chan! more offputting than salacious. I almost want to commend this series for threading that line between horny and disturbing. The premise is about a struggling artist who comes across a yokai that has the ability to take on the form of any artwork that they consume. The book takes full advantage of that, creating a variety of different characters and body types for visual appeal. The artwork is very crisp and detailed with plenty of bouncy, soft edges to be titillating. There is a bit of an underlying mystery regarding these yokai creatures and how they all seem to be converging at this specific place, but that type of world-building is definitely more in the background with the foreground just being a struggling artist adapting to this new status quo that he finds himself in. All the girls have pretty simple personalities, but they all bounce off of each other well and the antics surprisingly don't feel forced. Like I said, I can see the biggest hurdle to Gahi-chan! being the fact that the extra detail in the art can turn you away unless you are interested in that kind of stuff to begin with, but there is still a lot of cute lighthearted fun to be had here if you can look past that.