The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

UFO Mushroom Invasion

What's It About? 

“UFOs are one of the world's greatest mysteries...and I hope they stay that way. For the day that aliens reveal themselves may very well become the beginning of the end of life on Earth as we know it!”

A flying saucer crashes deep in the mountains of Japan. Wary of the hyper-intelligent beings they find inside, the government hides from the public all news of the alien craft. But it's not the strange visitors themselves that they should be afraid of―the real danger is the parasitic spores smuggled aboard! Will Earth survive the UFO MUSHROOM INVASION?!

Originally published in 1976, Shirakawa Marina's UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is a masterpiece of sci-fi horror. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Japanese folklore and the supernatural, Shirakawa created one of manga history's cult classics and an unforgettably creepy entry in the canon of spore-horror. With an essay by weirdologist Udagawa Takeo, UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is the second volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

UFO Mushroom Invasion has a story and art by Marina Shirakawa, with English translation by Ryan Holmberg. This volume was lettered by Ozzy van Eschen and Sean Michael Robinson. Published by Living the Line (September 17, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Do mushrooms make you uncomfortable? Is there something unpleasant about their odd shapes and strange, spongy texture? If the answer is yes, UFO Mushroom Invasion is the manga of your nightmares, because its plot involves alien fungi being brought to Earth in a flying saucer crash and taking over the world. People are colonized by the mushrooms, becoming human versions of insects infected by zombie fungus, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Even if mushrooms aren't the stuff of your nightmares, this is a genuinely unsettling book.

It's also an interestingly written one. The late Marina Shirakawa, who created manga during the 1970s and 80s, has a style that feels like a combination of Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezz, and Shigeru Mizuki, with creepy, stylized art and a penchant for breaking into folkloric tangents. The book combines traditional manga and illustrated story pages, with the latter covering the history of UFO sightings (primarily in Japan and the U.S.) and “bizarre mushroom tales,” which are retellings of various Japanese stories where mushrooms are the antagonists. It's odd but it does ultimately work, and I found myself enjoying the style mixing much more than anticipated – it creates an intimacy between author and reader that works to make the manga segments hit harder.

The science fiction/horror blend is in the classic vein of stories that predict that humans will become the authors of their own downfall. In this case, Professor White's greed to keep the information about an alien to himself allows the spores to spread; had he not silenced Aoki and Sado-sensei early on, the entire tragedy may have been at least partially preventable. But Shirakawa also leaves us room to wonder if maybe the mushrooms reclaiming the earth for nature isn't the best ending, anyway – it's an environmental message that makes a little bit of sense and one that you've probably seen before in the genre.

Alongside the well-translated story, this also has an essay about Shirakawa's place in the mangaverse as well as a retrospective of some of his works, both of which are interesting and very readable. Fans of 1970s manga (this was published in 1976, set in 1978, which allowed his original readers to wonder if it could happen in two years) or horror shouldn't pass this by.

UFO Mushroom Invasion does exactly what it says on the tin. Mushrooms from a UFO invade. This isn't as daft as it sounds, and despite its age (it was originally published in 1976) and very dated art style, UFO Mushroom Invasion is genuinely unsettling and creepy. Author Marina Shirakawa intersperses his chapters with relevant factual titbits about biology and folklore that helps to build a sense of looming dread, of inescapable catastrophe.

Aoki and his teacher are mere ciphers, headstrong student and stoic teacher. We learn almost nothing about them, their function is to be generic everyman witnesses to extraordinary events. I can't help but compare the opening chapters to the cheesy 1950's movie version of The War of the Worlds, though we soon enter far darker, weirder territory.

Anyone familiar with videogame/TV franchise The Last of Us will know how this goes – there's even a reference here to a Cordyceps-like fungus that controls its hosts, and the later appearance of fungal-infected zombie people, complete with mushrooms growing from their bodies.

What's different about UFO Mushroom Invasion compared to its later equivalents is in its nilhilsm. Even The Last of Us contains a seed of hope for humanity, not so here. In one particularly powerful scene, Aoki is told by a mushroom-infected adult to give in to the fungal invaders, to surrender his body to the soil of the warm Earth. This is a dark fable, an early musing on the Dark Forest hypothesis recently popularised by Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem. If aliens really are out there, we don't want them to know about us, because the moment they do, all life on Earth will change (end).

Full of arresting imagery, fascinating science and folklore, UFO Mushroom Invasion is considered a horror manga classic for a reason. Mushroom fans (looking at you, Lynzee), should definitely pick this up.