From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Makeshift City
This article is about the manga serial. For the embedded tale it expands, see Rico the Architect.
Serialized 2014–2016 in ██ Monthly , The Makeshift City expands the embedded tale into a full narrative tragedy. Rico is revealed not as a solitary architect but as a fractal consequence: each version of Leif who dies in the cycle births a new Rico, who constructs a miniature city inside the next Leif's body—a detailed map of escape routes that will never function.
Volume I traces Rico's original construction: the surgeon discovers a city growing in her patient's sternum and must decide whether to dismantle it or allow metastasis. Volume II: each cell of the city contains a different ending. Room 4A: Katita breaks the cycle. Room 7B: she fails. The basement: she never attempts it. Volume III: Leif becomes aware of the architecture nested in his body and begins attempting exit through non-Euclidean passages, fracturing his spine into compass roses and spirals.
The art is dense, heavily cross-hatched, with anatomical blueprints bleeding into city blueprints into circuit diagrams into surgical scar-maps. “Every building is a surgical instrument. Every room is a thought Leif is thinking but cannot finish.” The glitch is not resolved but fractally multiplied: the final panel is blank except for a grid, awaiting the reader's own city. Critical reception praised its visual architecture; collectors dispute which volume was first printed in which edition.