Uzumaki remains my favorite Junji Ito story. I wind up reading it at least once a year, which is honestly pretty messed up given it’s such an intense and brutal story with some really awful imagery. But I like horror, so that’s a feature not a bug, I guess? Uzumaki tells the story of a town cursed by spirals. That sounds stupid, I know, but the story does a really incredible job of making it threatening. When you think about it, spirals are whirlpools, tornadoes, […]

Tomie is one of what I’d consider Junji Ito’s three big stories: Tomie, Gyo, and Uzumaki. Tomie is the longest, and probably has the most variety. It concerns the title character, Tomie, a malevolent and supernatural young woman of incredible beauty that drives men insane, eventually to the point that they cut her to pieces. That last part is inevitable, every incarnation of Tomie eventually dies a horrible death, but it doesn’t really matter because she always comes back. What’s more, if she’s cut into pieces, each piece will […]