Tagame’s fetishistic toolbox overflows: clamps, electrodes, chains, candles, gags, ropes, hooks, dildos, thumbtacks, blades, piercings, handcuffs, canes, vinegar, belts, needles, and a memorable Perrier bottle. Yet the ritualized, almost solemn staging of their employment distinguishes his comics from ero-guro manga, or “erotic grotesque nonsense,” to use the wonderful literal translation – an artistic phenomenon dating back to the 1930s, in which human bodies become props for extravagantly cruel theatre, aberrant and amoral. (from the hazlit article linked below)

the ritualizing of the body thru artificial phalluses (the candle, the dildo, the hook, the blade, are not cock) (to be stabbed is to have an orifice made, the artifical phallus creates an artifical oifice)  the flaccid rope against hard body, the hard chain or rigid cane  against pliable body, the size o the needle and the size of the cock--all of the collapsing of diacritical pairs in tamage's best work, is a ritualised grotesqurie borrowed not only from the ero-guero tradition, but an attempt to westernize it, no? and so this seperating porn from the bad old not art and the good new totes art, is intensely problematic?