At Time.com, columnist Andrew Arnold gets into the spirit of Halloween with a review of three horror manga: Junji Ito’s Museum of Terror, Toru Yamazaki’s Octopus Girl, and Osamu Tezuka’s Ode to Kirihito.
… 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, all featuring the beguiling teenage Tomie, a supernatural beauty with a nasty attitude who inspires complex feelings in the men who fall under her spell. “I dream of having her all to myself,” says one would-be paramour, “Thing is, if she were mine … I think I might kill her. … I don’t know if even ripping her apart would be good enough. That’s the way she makes me feel.”
But it’s not Tomie you worry about. She gets slaughtered scores of ways, including being mashed into pulp and turned into sake, but always regenerates to induce her slaves into perverse acts of murder and torture. Instead, pity the poor wretches whose eyes turn dark and cheeks become sallow as their will power seeps away.
Related: Comics-and-Moore reviews Octopus Girl and The Bug Boy
