The Grotesque Art of Junji Ito

My first exposure to Junji Ito was in Spring, 2006, when I read a bizarre comic somewhere online called “The Enigma of Amigara Fault." After visiting the link, you, like me, will find you’ve been exposed to a highly unusual creator of comic art, with few comparisons on either side of the Pacific. Realizing this, I knew only that I had to have more, and more…and more. So, I began to seek out more information about this man and his queer manga.

The artist himself resides in Japan and has been a longtime craftsman of the grotesque, a dental technician, and has toyed with his ideas in manga, print, and film. The canon of his works exposed to the US is relatively limited, but those which are truly stand as some of his best works. And fortunately, even this may be slowly changing, since Dark Horse appears to be in the process of slowly printing translated versions of his full set of creepy manga, with three volumes printed already.

To date, I have wormed my way through his multi-volume mangas Uzumaki (Spiral), Gyo, as well as the shorter translated stories “Falling" and those which appear in volume three of Dark Horse’s Museum of Terror. Luckily enough, all of these works effectively represent the obsessions and sheer oddities that are the heart of Ito’s genius. Uzumaki, usually available in torrent form online and in fairly pricey print form, is a series of interconnected tales involving a Japanese town’s descent into madness over its obsession with spirals. The spiral itself becomes a sort of supernatural possession, heightening the insanity of the inhabitants with strange curses. People become snails, a girl’s hair is possessed by spirals and comes to life, and mushrooms with dizzying swirls sprout from spiral-infested pregnant women—all graphically portrayed by Ito’s frighteningly unique style. Gyo is equally strange, involving the rising of countless sea creatures bloated with a putrid gas that scurry about on land using sets of mechanical legs. Don’t worry, there is an explanation provided. Again, here the art is a hideous vehicle for forwarding the disturbing themes of Ito’s story.

Beyond these two long mangas and a selection of short tales, much of Ito’s work is beyond the American reader’s grasp, still existing only in Japanese or Korean. Yet, what is translated is just sufficiently weird and horrible enough to very likely continue generating interest (and sales), increasing the probability that we’ll see more of Ito’s haunting comics and films hit Western shores sometime soon.

-Namtlieu