In consideration of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s impact on certain styles of horror manga, I feel one field that’s under explored with Grand Guignol archival efforts is the history of drawn depictions of the group’s work. While I've found from my experience it’s impossible to figure out what the absolute “first” for any sort of publication related to the troupe could be, I do believe this counts as a candidate for one of its earlier artistic renditions. Complete Review Tokyo Grand Guignol + Suehiro Maruo: Mercuro by Yutaka Hosokura. Featured in an issue of June dated to May 1985, it doesn’t only precede Not Osada’s manga renditions but also the drawn illustrations that accompany the review for Lychee Hikari Club in June’s March 1986 issue. The coverage of the play itself is rudimentary, providing a rough synopsis of its most prolific set pieces while also praising its black comic gag-focused style alongside some compliments to the cast. The art is the definite focus here with its renditions of Mikami’s introduction and the play’s infamous Methods of Dance chestburster operation scene. Much like the ZOAR Tokyo Grand Guignol interview, it solely acknowledges Mercuro in the context of Maruo’s manga when it lends just as much to certain incidents that Ameya described from his childhood. From everything I found, Ameya himself didn’t see public recognition until after Galatia’s performances. Many of these early write-ups were solely focused on aesthetics, especially with the June publications which commonly highlighted the physical appearances of the actors. While Ameya approached theater from a varied range of theories including audio remixing and deriving a unique anti-romantic catharsis of distorting human interaction to cold unnaturally mechanical forms (said catharsis seemingly coming from a certain dissonance he described feeling toward the advanced nature of humans in contrast with other animals, see his interviews in the second issue of Madness and the sixth issue of Eater), these aspects of his work were rarely covered then and only started to enter public discussion with M.M.M. Skin and his performance art.
