Smashed is the latest collection of short horror mangas by acclaimed (though I don’t know why!) creator Junji Ito, none of which were especially good! I won’t go through each and every one in this bumper book but no single story stood out over the others - they were all pretty dumb!Īnd that’s the thing with Ito: he’s has no concept of subtlety - which I’m sure is what appeals to some of his readers - but the horror is so over-the-top that it undermines any potential scares and makes it hard to take the stories seriously. Since Tomie, many of his works have been adapted for TV and the cinema. In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu, Tomie was adapted into a movie. Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her - only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen.īefore Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature.

Ito's universe is also very cruel and capricious his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc.

The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby - even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga.

Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself.

Smashed by Junji Ito