For the Love of Comics: Junji Ito
Originally published at Curious Zoology. You can comment here or there.
Halloween is a week away, so it’s time to get some season appropriate things going around here.
First up is one of my favorite manga artist/writers, Junji Ito. One of his more well known works is a series of short stories called Tomie, which is about a beautiful high school aged girl who inevitability becomes the object of intense desire and lust that often leads to gruesome conclusions. His art style is more along the lines of the realistic and detailed that works really well with his disturbing story telling. He is able to bring the reader in to these worlds he creates and despite the horrors that are being drawn on the page, you want to keep reading until the bloody end.
Gyo is one of the first stories that I read and I enjoyed it enough to seek out his other works.
The story starts with Tadashi and his girlfriend enjoying a vacation which soon turns bad with smelly fish that have mechanical legs attached. The way this comic begins does not prepare you for where it’s going to end up.
I feel that the page on the left is a good example of both Gyo and Ito’s style in general. It shows off his realistic style that is disturbing, but not gruesome in the way that as a “torture porn” movie. Looking at that fish, you can tell it’s strange and frightening, possibly threatening, but it is not so disgusting that you have to turn away. That is where I feel Ito has a great strength in his art and one of the main reasons why I’ve tried to read as much by him as I can.
Uzumaki is another of his longer mangas that will take the reader on a journey to a town cursed with spirals. This is the work that really shows Ito’s ability to take something that seems so mundane and make it a terrifying experience.
The image on the right shows the spiral collection of a village inhabitant who is the first to die from the spiral curse. As a warning, there are some traumatizing scenes that Ito does not shy away from illustrating. Even when reading those pages, I found myself going over the detail to fully appreciate the time and effort and because I realize that at this point, I would not be able to bring myself to draw anything like them.
Junji Ito could be considered one of the masters of Japanese horror manga just by his prolific nature, but he’s able to back it up with creative story telling and detailed illustrations.
