Elytron Frass

[De-Con-Struc] Vitiators // Elytron Frass [Illustrated by Charles N.]

Reality and manga meld as one under the influence of Leibniz’s construction of a great baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced by windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but also a grinding meta-feud between a once beloved mangaka and his outraged fanbase who are themselves gods miscreated via a musical salon that translates the visible movements below into sounds up above.

This is the synopsis of Vitiators, between the folds.

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Vitiate is one of those words, like ablate or ablation, that I have to keep looking up. Not sure why.

It sounds very legal to me yet it is not.

Vitiate = to debase, corrupt, damage, destroy the moral or aesthetic status of something/someone.

So who exactly are the vitiators?

Am I [the reader] about to be vitiated?

Should I try and vitiate back do something about it?

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A while back, there was a video on YouTube reviewing Vitiators, with the title being something like: ‘is this the most shocking manga ever written?’

Shocking or disturbing, or disgusting, one of the three.

Is it accurate?

As with Sea of Glass, I would argue that there is no shock in text or image anymore, if there ever was.

Shocking to who[m]?

When I was a teenager, I watched a video of a Chechnyan soldier having his head sawn off. Beyond that, there is no shock. Not in art. Unless it’s actually real or something happening to a small child. That’s why war photography hits so hard. This was something done to someone by someone else. Or in modern warfare, someone very far away, pushing a button like a fucking coward. Not that doing it up close is any less cowardly. The power ratio is still the same. Just ask the child murderers of the IDF.

Is Elytron attempting to shock?

I don’t believe so.

Vitiators is more than that.

It has to be.

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The Boxer’s Omen // Elytron Frass

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Boxer’s Omen: A Recitation
by Elytron Frass

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FIRST BARDO

It’s Summer in Wood Rat Year. Sai ya sat is abrew. In Hong Kong International Airport, a black sorcerer runs for the terminal, coveting the needed natal data to cast his deadly spell. Category III flickers over the entire screen. He checks his six. He’s been tracked by an orange robed xian. The xian flashes him blind with Suraya mudra. Now he’s boiling to burst and sickly expressing a nuclear hue, best described as glowstick green. He oozes and falls—a humanoid simplex of spiritual herpes. A widow-witch exits his now-lifeless mouth—his jaws stretch apart, wider than a Thai elephant’s birth canal. The xian flashes Apana Vayu mudra. The widow-witch falls. White hair and fingernails for days. A small bat exits her mouth. The xian collects it. Cosmic lingam drips fetid tears for the bat’s punctured chest as the xian holds it over his sme-ba, hammering his meteoric iron phurba into the vermin’s doomed heart. This galvanic incident triggers the pettiest supernatural war of attrition; the incunabula of it all.

SECOND BARDO

A Spirit of Halloween warehouse moonlights as an illegitimate Petsmart in which an evil wu mourns for the death of his former black magic student. A low poly hologram of the murdered bat’s skeleton pays him a visit. He bobs in the bargain bin for a corpulent rat. With his teeth, he eviscerates it and proceeds to hawk entrails and blood mist onto the skeletal representation. The bat fails to exact his revenge on the xian. He drains Listerine from a venomous snake’s tooth. He pulls out a skull from a bowl of nam pla and intestines. He arrives in the night at a golden pagoda. Within it he clings to the ceiling. From up in his crush velvet spell bag, he shakes out six furry windup arachnids. Tarantulas, made in Taiwan, swarm the xian and prick him to death through the eyelids. It has been prophesized that a glorious fighter would later avenge him. 

THIRD BARDO

Time is distended for ominous boxing. Two Muay Thai combatants jump kick the bruise-blood clean out from each other’s moist, cauliflowering features. Chan Hung watches from behind the white ropes of the ring as his brother rocks a formidable rival to rest. Lactic acid begins to release when his foot jab lands a pyrrhic victory. Chan Hung’s brother stands with his arms raised. The sore loser, stirring behind him, winds up the sneak-attack roundhouse that will soon sever the champion’s c-spine. Chan Hung vows revenge from the bleachers. An old monk appears in the flicker and smoke of a budget effect. He implores Chan Hung to seek higher levels of vengeance, but for the Buddhists and not for himself. Chan Hung walks in liminal of two distinct tiers of requital: in the realm of the psychical senses, he trains to extinguish the wu for the Buddhists; in the realm of immediate flesh, he trains to defeat his paralyzed brother’s sworn kickboxing rival. Occult oaths are emulsified in their celluloid representations: a psychedelic frenzy of colorized ritual witchcraft and violence.   

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