GYO - JUNJI ITO

50 I don’t really read Manga or watch Anime. It’s never made a lot of sense to me or connected with whatever part of the brain lights up in Otaku when they see this stuff. I mostly envy them because there’s so much of it, so much is apparently good and there’s such a large community you can tap into. But regardless of my intentions my familiarity with this stuff stops at Dragonball Z and Trigun and stuff like that. However, I have heard from fans of this stuff that JunJi Ito is the master of Japanese horror comics and a pioneer in the genre of fish-horror. I needed only to hear the term, “fish-horror” to be onboard. I read what I was told was his masterpiece, Uzumaki, a while ago. It’s amazing and creepy but I’d kind of forgotten about the whole thing when I saw this one, the one that built is scary fish reputation, at the library and grabbed it. I read it all in one day and it’s great. It’s got everything, walking fish, evil circuses, possibly sentient smells, the end of the world. Very creepy. It features some of the grossest images I’ve ever seen in a comic. Enough body-horror for anyone. The  main fish story directly connects to Japanese warcrimes in the 20th century and the second two shorter stories are about a man literally crushed by his house and family while the last one features people being distorted and harmed by holes made for them to fit in. All of these strike me as very Japanese concerns and themes. Either way, this was excellent. More scary fish. 1,000 walking fish.