![]() So here’s the thing with Ito: like HP Lovecraft, Ito is great at producing haunting images of primal horror but, also like Lovecraft, he’s very clumsy, almost amateurish, in incorporating these images into traditional stories. Of the stories collected here - Billions Alone, The Human Chair, An Unearthly Love, Venus in the Blind Spot, The Licking Woman, Master Umezz and Me, How Love Came to Professor Kirida, The Enigma of Amigara Fault, The Sad Tale of the Principal Post, and Keepsake - none were very good. Also, it would’ve been good if the contents page listed in which collections the stories previously appeared, like most “best of” collections do, but seeing as this appears to be nearly all-new material then I can see why it didn’t! So this is a “best of” collection that features almost all-new stories!? The blurb also mentions special colour pages and illustrations from Ito’s latest book, No Longer Human, and it doesn’t. Viz Media’s blurb for Venus in the Blind Spot is really weird: it claims this is a “best of” collection of Junji Ito’s stories but, as far as I can tell, only one - maybe two - stories have previously appeared in print before: The Enigma of Amigara Fault and The Sad Tale of the Principal Post possibly both appeared in Dissolving Classroom. Since Tomie, many of his works have been adapted for TV and the cinema. In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu, Tomie was adapted into a movie. Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her - only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen.īefore Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Ito's universe is also very cruel and capricious his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc. The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby - even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga. From origins pertaining to alien creatures to demonic forces, a myriad of possibilities exists.Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Ito allows the reader to wander through the dark corridors of their mind as they attempt to find a solution to this problem. ![]() Readers are left wondering if Owaki was simply dreaming or if this past society had a part in the foundation of these mysterious holes. While these tunnels might be the invention of an ancient civilization that used technology unknown to the modern world, it remains a mystery as to how and why they precisely match the bodies of people from the present. As he moves through the passage, his body becomes deformed to the point that any human being could not survive, yet he remains sentient and screaming in agony. As punishment for committing a heinous crime, he is sentenced to enter a chasm that appears to have been specifically created for him. ![]() In one scene, Owaki has a dream in which he is a criminal from an ancient past. The origin of the human-shaped holes is never fully explained. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |