A moody collection of the work of Japanese manga artist Takaya Miou, now on view at the Honolulu Museum of Art, follows nicely on the heels of two recent shows, extending the mature themes and powerful imagery of “Modern Love: 20th Century Japanese Erotic Art” and the aesthetics of “Harajuku: Tokyo Street Fashion.” “Visions of Gothic Angels” plunges into the deeper, darker end of manga’s immensely popular and influential pool.

Those familiar with the form’s conventions of outrageous spiky hair, scintillating doe eyes, giant robots and Miyazaki-style innocence may be surprised by the dark-but-lush meditations on life, death, love and murder by Miou, a self-taught philosophy school dropout. The term “gothic” is really just bait to pull the viewer into an at-times challenging experience with modern manga.

The show features the original artwork for Miou’s graphic novels as well as individual illustrations and paintings. Her page designs eschew the typical rows of square frames in favor of cinematographic collages of viewpoints that present story, action and dialog as a single unit. Working parallel to the radical, borderline-abstract composition strategies of manga artists like Yasuhiro Nightow (“Trigun”) and Hiroyuki Takei (“Shaman King”), Miou demonstrates her mastery of an ultra-dense contemporary style and a use of white space and blocks of black to arrest a reader’s attention.

Pages from “Ribs of the Sky: Cooper’s Bad Boys” (an adaptation of writer Dennis Cooper’s challenging, violent fiction) feature isolated panels floating over a blurred urban skyline, bold geometric arrangements of erotic close-ups, and an eviscerated murder victim that resembles a blooming orchid. Most stunning, however, are the emblematic panels of “Brilliance,” in which Miou fuses portraiture, landscape and costume to illustrate a poetic narrative in which the emperor of the dead’s consort leaves him for the land of the living.

Though her work is classified as “shojo manga” (manga for young women), the exhibition gives little insight into what makes it particularly attractive to female readers. Generally, contemporary manga is driven by extremes of emotion, action and composition, and Miou’s themes of existentialism, marginalized sexuality, stylized despair and eroticization of death are as intense as the cosmic-scale kung fu duels and high-stakes romantic tragedies found in other manga genres.

Her six-winged angels, bouquets blooming from wounds, living skeletons and introspective immortals fit comfortably into a spectrum that includes the steaming, skinless giants of Hajime Isayama’s highly expressionistic manga “Attack On Titan.” Her full-color work compares to the paintings of fantasy artists Yoji Shinkawa (“Metal Gear Solid”) and Yoshitaka Amano (“Final Fantasy.”) Her level of detail, expressed in ribbon, intricate hairstyles and elaborate flower-and-bone garlands, rivals Mamouru Nagano’s complex mechanical designs and Shintaro Kago’s surreal, horrific vivisections of the female body.

However, rather than contextualizing her work in terms of her peers’, the show’s wall text and videos emphasize non-Japanese influences such as Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt and Renaissance religious painting. In contrast, the images she curates on her Tumblr page, konzent.tumblr.com, show a vast and sweeping array of influences based more on mood, texture and atmosphere .

From the exhibition, we learn that she was born in Nagoya, Japan, and is not at all religious, but little else. These biographical gaps, however, do not in any way undermine the work. These troubled characters enmeshed in cascading flowers and configurations of lace, bandages and bondage gear are the tips of vast narrative icebergs that invite you to dive as deep as your darker sense of adventure allows.