What is terrific is Ito's line work, and yes, he only seems to be getting better as an artist. Shelley’s story weaves in social commentary, but Ito lets that go to focus on the basic story, and this turns out to be a disappointing approach. It turns out to be rather flat, compared to Ito’s own original work, and less than scary. The Frankenstein story is the longest one, and it’s a (too) faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley's original. Since Tomie, many of his works have been adapted for TV and the cinema.įrankenstein collects horror manga-ka Ito's adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a series of short stories about a school boy, Oshikiri, who keeps getting into various creepy situations, and a bunch of one-off short-shorts at the very end, including one in tribute to Ito’s dog.

In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu, Tomie was adapted into a movie. Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her - only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate. 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.īefore Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. 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. Ito's universe is also very cruel and capricious his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. 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 woman 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. The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby - even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for 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.

Frankenstein junji