Is MAD Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Alien life-forms have already done most of the damage by the time MAD opens — humanity is reduced to scattered pockets of survivors, John and his sister among them, just trying to find somewhere safe to call home. That alone would be a familiar setup, but the manga's real hook arrives once John starts eating alien flesh to survive and discovers it's slowly turning him into one of the things that nearly wiped out his species.

Yusuke Otori, in his first serialized series, builds MAD around that uncomfortable trade: the only way to fight back is to become something less human, and the story treats that as a genuine horror rather than an edgy gimmick.

What it does well

The transformation premise is the clear strength here. It would be easy to play John's new alien abilities as a straightforward power-up, but the manga keeps circling back to what he's losing — his sense of self, his place among the people he's trying to protect — every time he gets stronger. That tension gives the fights actual stakes beyond survival; every victory costs him something.

The invasion itself is drawn with a real sense of dread. Otori isn't leaning on stock alien-movie imagery — the initial near-annihilation of humanity carries weight, and the horror elements land because the story takes the time to make the threat feel genuinely alien rather than just a generic villain force. The early volumes also move at a good clip, getting from setup to consequence fast enough that the premise's most interesting ideas show up early instead of being saved for some distant later arc.

Where it falls short

As a newer series, MAD hasn't had the space yet to build out its supporting cast the way its central premise deserves — several characters around John are still fairly thin, more function than person so far. Some of the survival-horror trappings — scavenging for supplies, tension between different groups of survivors — lean on genre shorthand before the story's more distinctive ideas take the wheel. And because the line between John's humanity and his growing alien nature is still being drawn, the emotional payoff of that arc is more promise than delivery at this point.

Verdict

MAD takes a familiar alien-apocalypse setup and finds a genuinely unsettling angle on it — becoming strong enough to fight back means becoming something you're afraid of. It's an early series still filling in its edges, but the core idea is sharp enough to make it worth following from here.