DESERTER - JUNJI ITO

I got lucky enough to see an exhibit of Junji Ito’s work when I lived in Tokyo. I don’t read a lot, or really any, Japanese comics. I find the whole realm very intimidating and strange. I’d love to get into more of it but it has the twin problems of every series being incredibly long and hard to start as well as the problem of terrible fans. Either way, I do love Junji Ito, I read most (all?) of his work that appears in English and I regard him as a total master. Uzumaki and Gyo are two of the greatest comics I’ve ever read and are so clearly from a specific, deeply-weird person that there really is no substitute. This collection gathers some of his early work, when he was doing the equivalent of short stories for anthology horror magazines in Japan. There is no introduction or notes of any kind. We don’t get to learn when these were published or how they were received in Japan or anything like that, we’re just dropped in. As you can imagine, this is an anthology so the quality varies. It seems pretty clear that Ito comes up with a spooky idea and then kinda works a bit of a story around it so he can show off this cool drawing idea he thought of. There are stories about evil hair, giant harpy-like monsters, a tape that makes you obsessed with dying, vampires, and bringing people back to life. I particularly enjoyed a story about a woman (demon?) who takes on the face of the person she spends the most time with, a story about a WWII deserter (the title story), and a story about an evil dream version of a person who is trying to force a character to literally be inside-out. There is also a story that features sokushinbutsu, the self-mummification process that I’m quite interested in. Some, maybe most, of the stories end sort of abruptly and are basically a vehicle for a couple of weird panels but man, are those panels weird and cool. No one draws gross, horrific original nightmares like Ito. Junji Ito is a true sicko.