Museum of Terror, Volume 1 (v. 1) by
Junji Ito by Junji Ito
Defiantly Changed My View On The Whole 'Manga' Thing!
Dark Horse Comics is very proud to present Museum of Terror, a series of
horror stories by Japans foremost creator of horror manga. Full of
compelling and charming characters and relationships, and featuring some
of the finest comics art available, Junji Ito has seen his works translated
into successful films in Japan. Itos Uzumaki, the thrilling and grotesque
manga and film, has already found success in America, and now we
present Tomie, the first story in this fantastic series. Tomie is the story of
an eternally youthful and beautiful high school girl, whose admirers are
obsessed to the point of murdering her. But to their horror, she is
reincarnated over and over. Tomie also became a popular film in Japan,
and now it launches Dark Horses series of Itos horrific works, Museum of
Terror.

Personal Review: Museum of Terror, Volume 1 (v. 1) by Junji Ito
by Junji Ito
Tomie is the object of everyone's desires. Obsession would find her
attractive, and desire would covet her hand. The problem with Tomie is
that she's not only beautiful but she's also cruel, becoming the proverbial
barb that claws at the skin of every one of this flower's bearers. Not able to
part with - or even share - her, the men (and sometimes women) in
Tomie's life are drawn not only into love but also into a cycle that hopes to
possess her - even to the point of killing her and not really understanding
why. Sometimes this leads to some really gruesome points, with some
people not only dismembering her but also grinding her to pulp or
becoming stagehands in even more novel acts of morbidity. The thing
about that is that Tomie doesn't really take to being dead long - killing her
only gives rise to more Tomies and they are never happy with each other
or the offending party involved.
If you've never seen the work that Ito does, he is masterful with horror
scripts and illustrates with a macabre sense of delight as shadow and
depth crawl through a world of both light and dark and make something -
beautiful. Few really seem to do black and white well but Ito excels at it,
putting together a portrait of strange happenstance that are sometimes
amazingly bleak and sometimes just amazing. I've been a fan of his work
for a while now, really enjoying the three Uzumaki books he did, and I
thought that I'd actually seen everything he had to offer when The Museum
of Horror bombshells went off by me.
I was stunned, to say the least.
For anyone that read the older English collections of Tomie (myself
included), you only found yourself reading partial variations of a much
larger story. Ito himself attempts to explain this in the back of the 1st new
book, saying that the old books had been put together by grouping what
the Tomie stories were about more than when they came out. This led to
many a confabulated look and many an incomplete piece of work, with
stories not meeting in sequential order and whole panels missing. The
variety of mistakes was huge, too, and might have been somewhat funny if
not for the fact that, along with the missing pieces, there were also missing
stories.
When I say missing stories I mean a missing volume; when you take the
1st collection of books and hold it to the new editions you can tell that both
of the original Tomie books could fit into the first book. So, the Museum of
Horror books are good buys.
The 1st book is basically a sequential volume that tells tale after tale of
Tomie, beginning with a really twisted story and ending with some rather
twisted means. The tales included in this volume are: Tomie, Tomie Vol. 2,
Basement, Photo, Kiss, Mansion, Revenge, Waterfall Basin, and Painter.
While many of these connect outright, some connect in more subtle
fashions and follow characters that are, for a lack of better wording, caught
in the web that is Tomie. Of these stories I found myself really liking the

beginning and perhaps Kiss the most, but really just enjoying the read all
the way through. I also liked the fact that this was linear as a concept this
time around, giving the reader what Ito was thinking as he was thinking it.
That explained a lot - and disturbed a little more.
For people who enjoy stories with twisted spines, horror that could pass
both as Pulp and as terror, and works that are different in a way and
beautiful in black and white then this is something for you. The first two
books, all Tomie, paint a picture of something that would be, in a word,
quite terrible.
With the new work almost making these new stories, they are really worth
the buy.
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