October is Spookey Month: Someone's rockin' list of the "10 Most Frightening Horror Comics Ever!"

I know nothing of this Herald Scotland site, but I salute the good (or foul, depending on your perspective and whether or not you go through life talking like one of EC Comics' horror hosts) taste of Graphic Content writer Teddy Jamieson.  Not only does Jamieson quote Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but he manages to include Junji Ito's horror masterwork Uzumaki on the list.  At Paste Magazine you can read a similar 13 item list called "13 Terrifying Modern Horror Comics," which I saw posted by Fantagraphics on Facebook earlier this week.  That one is very Western comic-centric and the choices more conventional than Jamieson's, but they overlap, too.  I admire Jamieson for having the guts to lead off the list with a most personal choice.  He also puts Jack Chick tracts on his list.  I remember coming across those from time to time when I was a kid and he's right.  They're scary!  At least they were when the threat of hell or running into a hippie mocking my religious beliefs with a dismissive "HAW HAW!" were the worst things I could imagine.

Personal choice is appropriate because our most frightening comic is the one that affects us most regardless of its wider reputation.  I found myself exposed to a great many shitty horror comics when I was a kid and quite a few managed to genuinely frighten me even with crude art and strained writing. 

Sometimes even genre doesn't matter.

Jack Kirby scared the snot and the buggers out of me with his chilling final image in Kamandi #20 of our long-haired hero alone on a ruined pier.  I mean utterly alone, overlooking what I assumed at the time to be a monster-haunted Lake Michigan.  No one to help him, not the indifferent gulls circling overhead, certainly not the angry gorillas ravaging the robotic theme park Kamandi had just escaped.  No humans, just robots going through the motions of 1920s-era Chicago gangland clichés.  Poor lonely Kamandi.  The imagery was bleak, the closing copy promised more horrors to come.  Shudder!

Another story that gave me the willies was "Evolution's Nightmare" in Marvel/Curtis Planet of the Apes #5.  It opens with humans and gorillas fighting El Cid-style in a desert wasteland, then ends with radioactivity-devolved apes and men duking it out with rocks and clubs in a bomb-ruined San Francisco.  They even kill the two main characters (who spent the intervening pages painfully learning tolerance) before grunting and screaming in mindless hate at each other from atop wrecked cars full of skeletons and across piles of shattered asphalt.  Doug Moench's depressing narrative captions inform us everything moves in circles and those circles stink.  Artist Ed Hannigan's (Jim Mooney inks, by the way) double-page spread of piles of dead warriors with their eyes lifelessly open only added to the lingering fear instilled in me by this creepy story.

Obviously, neither of those two are horror stories.  They're both rough-house science-fiction adventures.  You can find horror-like frights anywhere.  In a plot twist in an otherwise innocuous superhero book, gazing at you from a house ad in a humor comic, jumping out at you from behind a brick wall on a sunny street in Riverdale, USA.

Or in an actual horror comic.  Like Uzumaki.  Serialized in Big Comic Spirits (it's a seinen manga, or dude's comic, so be careful opening that link) from 1998 to 1999, Ito's Uzumaki is the greatest horror story ever published in comic book form.  I'm comparing it to everything from Charles Burns' Black Hole, which made Fantagraphics' list (and is a moody, troubling work in its own right) to EC and every horror comic in between.  Out of all the fright fun I've had reading horror comics, only Uzumaki gave me feeling of truly dreading the next development in a story in my life.  Of doom.  Or of being genuinely grossed out by so many drawings in one place.  Uzumaki's dreamlike inevitability remains after you close the book having followed its main characters deep into the heart of ancient fears.

Uzumaki tickles your fright bone the way a cold wind from across the dry grass of graveyard might gooseflesh your arms.  Bruised clouds passing overhead like witches, their shadows falling around like concentrated night, on the move, looking for you.  Dead leaves hissing at you along the curb.  Hurrying you homeward where you face a dark, empty house where the rooms echo only with your voice.

Story and art by Junji Ito

And the soft footsteps of another.  Though nobody else is home.

Here's something that's not frightening.  It's a performance by Hamamatsu's own Spookey!

October is Spookey Month: "Uzumaki," another Halloween reading recommendation!

Junji Ito, Uzumaki (1998-9)

I don’t know why Junji Ito hasn’t caught on with manga fans in the Americas.  Both Viz Media and Dark Horse Comics have released very nice books collecting Ito’s work, but they don’t seem to have made much of an impact there as far as comics culture goes.  I think he should be mentioned in the same breath as Mike Mignola, but he seems largely a cultish figure, and somewhat elusive.  Dark Horse has two Museum of Terror volumes (the third seems to be out of print) and Viz offers Uzumaki, of course.  Gyo is worth a read, although I didn't particularly care for it.  It's about dead fish and a killer odor, neither of which inspires much interest in me.  But Museum features Ito's most well-known creation-- Tomie, the beautiful, unkillable school girl-- and inspired a hit-and-miss movie series that seems never to to die completely, just like Tomie herself.  Uzumaki also became a film, a severely truncated version with a hugely disappointing ending and played largely for laughs.  A great deal of Ito's more recent short stories and other tales-- many of which are absolutely brilliant-- haven't been made available in English other than through "scanlations."

What is Ito like in his every day life?  Probably just another hard-working mangaka.  A regular kind of guy who puts in long hours at the drawing table.  After all, before he began his comics career and started creating chills and thrills, he was a dental technician.  But in his stories, the man reveals a seriously twisted genius.  His characters inhabit a universe ruled by dream logic, by malicious forces acting either arbitrarily or for capricious reasons beyond our human understanding.  Whatever it is, it's a dark, pitiless place with little hope for escape or redemption.  Ito's work is true horror and the man doesn't really have any peers, because no one working in the genre can touch him.  

While I was an imaginative little kid who often spent sleepless nights after reading even the mildest of DC ghost stories, as an adult I’m pretty hard-boiled when it comes to printed horror.  Uzumaki, Ito’s masterpiece, gave me a serious case of the creeps.  It made my stomach churn.  Even today, years after I initially read Uzumaki, moments from the story recur in my mind, like childhood nightmares recalled time and again in broad daylight, in the most unexpected of places.  Writing this, I suddenly feel it faintly in my nervous system, on my skin, as if it Ito himself tattooed itself there, indelible.  As the old idiom goes, it's as if someone walked on my grave.

Kirie Goshima is a normal high school girl, another of Ito’s fragile, doll-like female protagonists.  She lives in Kurozu-cho ("Black Vinegar Town"), a seaside town like many here in Japan.  Sea for one border, mountains for another.  Kurozu-cho is a little cut off from the rest of Japan thanks to geography, and it has a mysterious past.  Little by little—a whirlwind here, a guy obsessed with swirling his miso soup there—Kirie discovers to her growing horror an ever-pervasive influence by the spiral.  No ghosts, no monsters, just a simple shape curving in on itself.  Kirie‘s boyfriend Shuichi has already noticed things not quite normal and is coming unraveled.  Kind of like a thread from a blanket that curls in your fingers as you try to pluck it.

And with that simple set-up, life for the two luckless teens increasingly spirals out of control.  Ito tells the story in vignettes, from Kirie’s point of view; Shuichi has introduced the girl into a world where literally anything can be perverted by the pernicious influence of the spiral.  After a couple of early chapters, each of which tends to follow a formula of developing a premise, developing it, then delivering a disgusting punchline, you begin to anticipate what the spiral will do next.  The results still shock.

Like diseased mushrooms, events grow inexorably out of each other and transformations and mutations abound.  As the spriral closes in, Kurozu-cho darkens to a place where a girl with a crescent-shaped scar on her forehead becomes a monstrous entity, a boy obsessed with pop-up surprise scares becomes a ruined jack-in-the-box figure and even the joy of birth becomes the stuff of nightmares.  The signal transformation involves a particularly slow-moving classmate of Kirie’s.  His physical and mental changes are off-putting enough by themselves, but just when you think you’ve reached the point where you can somewhat live with the memories (or at least resume your normal diet), they maddeningly recur to other characters until the situation escalates to what is arguably cannibalism—or something for which we’ll have to invent a completely new word for gastronomic crimes against humanity.  Kirie pursues these rapidly proliferating horrors towards their twisted center, where the story takes on Lovecraftian proportions and escape may prove impossible.

These are stories to read in the daytime.  If you can find them, that is.  But be warned—Ito does not flinch from reshaping his characters to suit the spiral’s whims and a lot of the imagery is extremely disturbing.  Not for tender psyches or weak constitutions.  Oh, and don't eat escargot before you read it.

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Uzumaki... spiral into... Halloween!

Ito Junji's disturbing horror manga Uzumaki was made into a film back in 2000. While the comic ended on a Lovecraftian note, the movie keeps the horror on a more personal level. Possibly because the budget for a more faithful adaptation would have been enormous. Uzumaki the movie is also pretty campy, sometimes substituting goofy comedy for the truly nauseating terror of the original. It's lots of good fun if you can stream it or Netflix it or whatever it is you youngsters do nowadays. But if you haven't read the comic, you really need to.

Unless you have a weak stomach. It made me feel queasy, but I couldn't stop myself from turning each page.  Still, I would feel terrible if I became responsible for cookies being tossed, lost lunches or even a chuck being upped.

The middle chapters are a bit formulaic, but what a formula! Ito creates the perfect atmosphere of growing dread by setting up each vignette and letting them lead to each inexorable conclusion. When Shuichi's father kills himself under the spiral's spell, his mother grows to fear and loathe the shape to the point of injuring herself to rid her body of it. At one point, Shuichi consults with a doctor and in a moment of horror, realizes there are spirals just inside our ears. At that point, he'll do anything to prevent his mother from learning of this... The beautiful girl with the crescent-moon scar on her forehead. The classmate of Kirie's with the gorgeous, curly hair. The boy who likes to spring out at people and scare them. A slow-moving classmate during snail season. Pregnancy. A typhoon. It just gets worse and worse until only Shuichi and Kirie are left to escape, or failing that-- to confront the spiral where it's most powerful.

When I lived in Japan, I had a collection of delightfully disgusting Ito stories.  I have no idea what the title was; it was all in Japanese.  I bought it simply because I recognized his art on the cover.  Inside were stories about teens with pimples, a bully who grew up into the worst mother ever, a particularly nasty circus and the absolute lousiest way to lose weight ever invented.  Because I couldn't read it, a friend of mine translated it fairly loosely for me.  It was also her first encounter with Ito's work and it cracked her up.  Or maybe she was laughing at me for liking it so much.

I don't have a new (or even an old) Spookey clip for you today, but here's something you might enjoy: