Parasitic City #0.1

Parasitic City #0.1 — Shintaro Kago

Parasitic City #0.1 is the entry point into Shintaro Kago's long-form dystopian series for Hollow Press. Issued as a compact A4 booklet ahead of the main numbered volumes, it functions as a prologue in object form—establishing the series' visual register and thematic logic in 24 pages. Parasites as instruments of moral control, reincarnation as currency: the premise is stated early and without softening.

The format keeps its construction visible. Full-color offset printing on an A4 sheet, finished with a stapled binding. At 24 pages, the issue sits closer to a pamphlet than a book, but it is produced and distributed as a collectible release within the Hollow Press catalogue.

This is the English Edition, issued as a third printing limited to 600 copies. Credits: edited by Michele Nitri, graphic design by Marco Cirillo Pedri, English translation by Iain Halliday.

Kago's approach to comics treats the page as a mechanism. Panel grids, repetition, and bodily transformation are not decorative choices—they are structural ones. In the Shintaro Kago body of work associated with ero-guro and formal experimentation, Parasitic City #0.1 represents the series in miniature: compressed, precise, and consistent with the methods carried through the later volumes.

The remaining issues in the series are available separately:

• Parasitic City #0.2
• Parasitic City #0.3
• Parasitic City #1
• Parasitic City #2
• Parasitic City #3