Word: horror
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Though Halloween may be a Western holiday, if you want to read horror comics this week, you'd do better turning to Japan. The wealth of material being imported far outpaces the amount and quality produced domestically in the horror genre. Three outstanding recent releases range in style from a twist on the teenagers-in-peril subgenre (Junji Ito's Museum of Terror) to extreme gross-out humor (Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl) to a disturbing medical thriller by Japan's most revered comix creator (Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito...
...various publishers of translated manga, Dark Horse comics has distinguished itself in publishing superior horror titles, releasing five different multi-volume horror titles this year alone. Among them were two that should not be missed: Junji Ito's Museum of Terror and Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl. Arguably Japan's premier horror manga-ka, Ito has a fevered imagination that has given us Uzumaki, about a town beset by spirals, and Gyo, about dead fish that sprout legs and wreak havoc upon the land. Museum of Terror (two volumes so far, $14 each) collects the so-called Tomie tales...
...just the required amount of gore but smartly expands on such commonplace terrors as the fear of losing oneself in a relationship. Though the mostly unconnected stories lack the satisfying arc of a novel, acquiring at least one of the two volumes of Museum of Terror will fulfill any horror fan's bloodlust...
Where Junji Ito represents the classic horror style, Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl takes the genre to its comical extremes. Conflating the ultra-cutesy style of girl's shojo manga with outrageously repulsive gross-out humor, the three volumes so far ($13 each) may be the funniest books of the year, as well as the most disgusting. The first story of the first volume starts like a typical shojo book might, with a bunch of school girls tormenting their cute classmate Takako. But in this version, they jump on top her and make her lunch vegetables squirt out her nose...
...route long ago; now movie audiences are finding that Superman is no match for Grizzly Man. Some gifted directors (Martin Scorsese, Michael Apted, Werner Herzog) commute easily between fiction films and documentaries. They know that good stories don't always come from a writer's imagination. JT Petty makes horror movies for a living. (He also writes video games and children's books.) But he was haunted by a real story from his youth: a neighbor had been stalking and taking movies of local women. Decades later, Petty couldn't get the man to talk on camera...