Junji Ito
Junji Ito (伊藤 潤二) is an author of Japanese horror manga. 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. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician and until the early 90s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby, even after receiving the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga.
Ito's comics are extremely gory, but humorous and often very original. His stories are typically about people whose jealousy and obsessions drive them to gruesome ends, only to bring them back to in mangled form to finish off the remaining protagonists.
The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. 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 women 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.
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. 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.
Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful and eternally youthful highschool girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other and finally her, but is herself endlessly reincarnated.
In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ring (1998), Tomie was adapted into a movie. Ito continues to publish comics in monthlies and weeklies, and has had many of his comics adapted for TV and the cinema.
Bibliography
- Tomie
- Flesh-Colored Horror
- Uzumaki (manga)|Uzumaki
- Gyo
- Mimi's Horror Stories
- Voices in the Dark
Filmography
External Links:
Referenced By
List of Japan-related topics 123-K | Manga-ka | Manga artist | Mangaka
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