What is not often stated about Itō's body of work is that he has frequently published comics in magazines for girls and women, and this new book, a suite of eight short stories, is closer to the long out of print Itō anthologies published by ComicsOne ( Tomie vols. Yet Fragments of Horror is not like Uzumaki - which debuted in Japanese in a seinen magazine for adult men, run by one of VIZ's parent companies - nor its follow-up in English translation, the similarly-targeted Gyo. In some ways, this perception endures the shop where I bought this book does not carry much manga, but it always carries Junji Itō, and I suspect VIZ is counting on just that phenomenon for valuable ancillary sales. Lovecraft, and that his art - sleepless characters drawn without significant exaggeration until faced with fabulously detailed horror phenomena, their baggy eyes then blackening and their mouths stretching, drooling faces sweating until the decay of their bodies usurp the plainness of their skin like underdrawing righteously augmented with pustule shade - did not look like the stereotypical idea of commercial Japanese comics. It did not hurt that Itō was upfront about a prominent western influence, H.P. The initial forum for Uzumaki's English translation was Pulp, a magazine dedicated to manga for mature readers, with columns by the likes of comic book writer Warren Ellis manga had not quite imprinted itself upon big box bookstores, where the audience would prove considerably younger and less male, so Pulp appealed in large part to factions of the existing comic book readership, which had long suckled from publishers' assumptions as to what sort of Japanese comics would fit in with direct market fare. There is a very good chance that even if you don't read a lot of manga you've probably heard of Junji Itō, and I will begin by suggesting that this very renown can serve to obscure the finer points of his work.Īs some of you will remember, Itō first captured a significant amount of North American attention in the early '00s through VIZ's publication of Uzumaki, a serial about people obsessed, transformed, and mostly destroyed by uncanny spiral shapes the concept was novel and the execution superb, but 15 years ago, the manga readership was not what it is now.
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