Uzumaki (3-in-1 Deluxe Edition): Includes vols. 1, 2 & 3 (Junji Ito)

Product Information

When it comes to horror manga, every debate has to have Junji Ito's Uzumaki as either the starting or finishing point. Drawn from 1998 to 1999, Uzumaki is a perfect example of a master at the peak of his career and proof that a visual narrative can be spooky, smart, Lovecraftian, and gory without being derivative or having to rely on clichés. Okay, one more time, cuz I really need to talk about Kirie and Shuichi and how much I loved their relationship. Shuichi's devotion and Kirie's unfailing caringness 🥹 *sniff* GOALS. The love between them was very subtle and yet, genuine. I LOVED IT! 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. 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.

Absolutely terrifying and disturbing. I’m slightly traumatized, yet I could not look away because the illustrations were amazing! I wonder what goes on in Junji Ito’s mind because never in my life have I read anything like this before. That being said, I will now proceed to devour the rest of Ito’s works.

Whether or not you like body horror will also definitely be a determining factor in your enjoyment level. Horror master Junji Ito explores a new frontier with a grand cosmic horror tale in which a mysterious woman has her way with the world!

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. 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.

Table of Contents

An ever-increasing malice. A mind-numbing terror. The seeds of horror are sown in this collection of Junji Ito’s earliest works. Besides the art, Uzumaki is a must-read classic because the chapters, which are all fragments of a very cohesive narrative, offer a wonderfully original mix of everything from body horror and adventure to survival/post-apocalyptic elements and a few Lovecraftian touches. Also, the story works as a study of the strongest human emotions. Ito takes away all fillers and delivers 20 chapters full of panic, anxiety, and paranoia. Shuichi knows what's happening, but no one will listen to him, and that turns him into a recluse who seems to spiral (no pun intended) slowly into madness out of fear and frustration. When you take all that and add the suffering of family members and the fact that the curse seems to augment every negative human trait, Uzumaki turns into the kind of horror story that works on many levels. this three-in-one collection tells the story of a town completely unravelling through unsettling, disgusting, horrifying, and mind-bending body horror. The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. 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.

Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. However, the town is not haunted by a person or a being, but a pattern - uzumaki, the spiral. Another of Junji Ito's classics, the sci-fi masterwork Remina tells the chilling tale of a hell star. Y es que si nos damos cuenta las espirales están por todas partes, desde nuestras huellas dactilares hasta la probóscide o trompa por la cual las mariposas liban el néctar de las flores. A través del tiempo, la Literatura y otros medios han satisfecho la progresiva curiosidad del ser humano mediante la introducción no sólo de personajes sino lugares ficticios (ciudades, pueblos) que rápidamente se popularizaron y convirtieron en el origen y/o destino de algunas de las historias más memorables hasta ahora conocidas. De Metrópolis a Ciudad Gótica, las urbes de la imaginación son frecuentemente una imitación, extensión o crítica (análisis) del mundo y los espacios comunes y escogidos que en él se hayan. Una de las ramas desprendidas de tan amplio tronco es el “pueblo fantasma”, bifurcación que en los videojuegos alcanzó su cúspide con “Silent Hill” (Raccoon City de “Resident Evil” no es un pueblo fantasma—apenas una ciudad afectada por un virus), en el cine llegó con “Children of the Corn” (basada en el cuento de Stephen King, también fundador del pueblo maldito “Desperation”), cinta que inauguró—ahora sobre-explotado género—la interminable serie de películas “B” (que bien deberían ser “C” o “D”), de las que aparece una cada pocos años, y en las letras, con orgullo para México y el Arte latinoamericano, nunca se vio mejor expuesto en su precisión de horror y belleza que bajo el nombre Comala, en "Pedro Páramo", de Rulfo. Es con idéntico mérito que Kurouzu-cho, la enloquecedora aldea centro de “Uzumaki”, de Junji Ito, se integra a la lista como una de las creaciones espacio-temporales más originales y aterradoras, independientemente a su género, que hemos tenido oportunidad de conocer—y visitar. Serializada por Big Comic Spirits entre 1998 y 1999 (resultando en tres tomos tankobon editados por Shogakugan), Uzumaki es el título que finalmente disparó a Ito al estrellato, colocándolo como uno de los mangakas de mayor talento, así como el máximo exponente del terror (junto con Kazuo Umezu) en el Manga. Este reconocimiento ha ido creciendo fuera de Japón con los años, especialmente en Estados Unidos y Europa, donde Ito primeramente recibió críticas mediocres mas poco a poco fue convirtiéndose en lo que actualmente, y sin duda, es: un autor de culto. No es extraño que algunos artistas (David Lynch, por ejemplo) u obras (“Requiem for a Dream”, de Aronofsky) tarden años—décadas, incluso—en obtener el prestigio que ameritan. El “exceso”, sin importar se trate de un libro, una película, una melodía, una puesta en escena o una pintura, tiende a espantar o aburrir. Pero existen los casos donde, bien empleado, éste es nada menos que una de las muchas formas de manifestar el Arte. Aquí yace el caso de “Uzumaki”, en la actualidad incluida en “1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die”, editado por Paul Gravett, y posicionado en el 2º Lugar (apenas debajo de “The Drifting Classroom”, de Umezu) en el “Top 10 Horror/Thriller Manga” de IGN, la popular compañía de juegos y entretenimiento con base en San Francisco, USA.ito can jangle your chain with outlandish, surrealist scary images as if they were jump scares, but he can also add to slow-creeping dread of the overall story. Wow, what a macabre masterpiece. This was gory and grotesque and very disturbing and at the same time the story is amazing and I could hardly put it down. It was amazing and it had boundless imagination. The story kept getting more and more hopeless until the bitter end. I mean this really is a horror story, but man, it's so good at the same time. It's a nightmarish brilliant piece of art. I can't explain it better than that. Spirals are one of those naturally occurring shapes and are fairly common to see if you're looking for them, and Junji Ito uses that fact to scare the shit out of us. To say the images in this leave quite an impression is an understatement.

Cada capítulo parece ser independiente, nos va relatando los hechos que van teniendo lugar en el pueblo y sus gentes, pero todo está magistralmente hilado para dar forma a una historia donde se ve claramente la influencia que ha tenido y sigue teniendo Lovecraft en Junji Ito; ese miedo a lo arcano, a lo desconocido que tan bien sabe mezclar con los mitos y folklore del país nipón. First of all, there are two things that determine how much I'm gonna like a book: the beginning and the ending. I thoroughly enjoy horror comics, so it was a nice sideways step to slide into horror manga. Not sure I would recommend this to just anyone who was looking to get into manga, though. Todo parece estar relacionado con una ancestral maldición que recae sobre el pueblo de manera cíclica.

that said, there are plenty of criticisms to be had. its format contains a lot of same-structured chapters, where every chapter introduces a Horrific Event Of The Week arc. this is followed by another (and another, and another) until everything gets progressively worse.