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 […]

This is one of the rare cases where I’m not going to full-throatedly recommend a Junji Ito. Most of the stories in Alley are the same stories that made it into the Junji Ito cartoons, alongside Shoichi, which is a terrible series of stories in my opinion. These are a lot of the weirdest Ito stories that make a little more sense than they did in animated form, but not enough to really make the difference. A standout story is Mold, which continues Ito’s grossout storytelling similar […]

Gonna speedrun my way to 52 like an asshole who completely missed the point. Uncanny is an excellent insight into how Junji Ito worked across his storied career, akin to Stephen King’s On Writing and every bit as enjoyable.