![]() ![]() But as inventive as his stories are and as horrifying as I would find these tales had they been committed to film, they come off rather sterile in screentones. He’s created several works that have been lauded for their depiction of strange horror. ![]() Junji Ito is, so I read, considered to be a master of Japanese horror. To prevent confusion for American readers. These images have been reversed from their originals And Ito seemed the perfect guide if anyone was. Not so much because I like being frightened but simply because I love experiencing the expanding boundaries of what the medium is capable of. I hoped that his mind-bending work would bring me to see that the comics page could truly deliver terror. ![]() When I first approached Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, I hoped for my understanding of comics horror to undergo a dramatic shift. There seems little room for the supernatural to scare us from the immobile, two-dimensional page. Certainly a compelling story about the affects of war on a civilian population can horrify, but only because it is humanity who is the monster and not some lumbering creature of the imagination. Additionally, revulsion is increasingly difficult to elicit from static imagery-a gross drawing is merely that and draws forth none of that sense of fear or terror that aficionados of the genre tend to relish. Because the reader controls entirely the pace of a story’s execution, one of the primary tools of the horror genre is kept from authors in the comics medium. I’m skeptical of comics’ power to truly horrify using supernatural elements. ![]()
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