Museum of Terror 3 (2006)
by Junji Ito
Don’t expect something similar to Gyo or Uzumaki, Ito’s short work is much less impressive than his longer stories. Partly it’s due to the length of the pieces. The impact of Uzumaki, for example, comes from the cumulation of single stories all involving a common element that makes them pieces of a bigger tapestry, which allows Ito to explore the characters and the ideas (and its consequences) with much more depth and to flesh out the details. Here we have disconnected pieces that stand alone and don’t have the same cumulative force. The characters and ideas remain underdeveloped, and very often it feels like the author is telling us what’s horrifying, instead of showing it to us (like he did so eloquently in Gyo or Uzumaki). Also the stories are far too often formulaic and have generic endings (or endings that feel as if Ito didn’t knew how the end it properly and just stopped).
As this is only one of the early volumes of the 15-part collection of his short work, I wonder if his later short work improved much. That’s not to say this collection is bad, it’s an interesting read, but in comparison to Gyo or Uzumaki much weaker.
Rating: 3/5
Uzumaki (1998-1999)
by Junji Ito
Take a simple concept (a spiral), make people obsessed about it and tell seemingly disconnected stories about people in a small town going nuts over the spiral pattern in all the variations it can turn up in nature, humans or artificial things. Then crank up the pace, until you have a small apocalypse engulfing the small town, with no one able to leave (entering from the outside is still possible). I saw the movie some years ago, that covered most of the first volume, and while it was interesting, it couldn’t capture the spirit of this brilliant manga. Like Gyo this is an endlessly inventive horror manga that starts out slowly and subtly, then picks up the pace and uses in-your-face shock effects and fast action and yet still remains dreadful and disturbing in subtle way up to the end. Uzumaki is quite unlike anything else, a rare find in our world, where seemingly every idea has been done already.
Rating: 5/5
Birds, Bees, Blood, & Beer (2007)
by Ben Templesmith
collects Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse 1-4 + Taster
Think Hellboy, less serious in tone but with an art style that makes it look at times like a fever dream. The effect of being both funny and quite disturbing at times is an interesting experience. Wormwood himself is a talking worm who uses human corpses as exo-skeletons and gathers other able personal to solve cases, not because he likes doing it, but because somehow strange things always happen around him. This time it’s about pregnancies of the monster-kind, humans (both gender) birthing some strange things and dying in the act. It’s an entertaining story up to the ending, which utilizes such a stupid (but also funny) deux ex machina that I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Still, apart from the ending, quite good.
Rating: 4/5
The Last Enemy (2007)
by Garth Ennis, Art by Rob Steen
I rarely say something about the art in comics, because in general I’m much more interested in the writing, the plot and the characters. But comics is more than that, the art is as basic as the rest. And sometimes, when it’s really weak, you can’t overlook it. Point in case this one-shot sequel to Garth Ennis’s Chronicles of Wormwood, which has a nice cover by Jacen Burrows, but the interior art is completely by Rob Steen. And man, did I miss Burrows art (he did all the art on the original Chronicles of Wormwood). I don’t want to heap all the blame on Steen’s art, the story itself is a bit lackluster and not that interesting, but boy does the art look like shit. It’s still readable, after all this is work by Ennis and even at his worst he’s not the bottom, but it surely isn’t his best.
Rating: 2/5
Gyo (2001-2002)
by Junji Ito
Gyo begins harmless enough, which an overwhelming stench that bothers the girlfriend of main char Tadashi. The cause, a small, walking fish. If the best of science fiction can draw upon the often mentioned experience of Sense of Wonder, then the best horror evokes something similar, an overwhelming Sense of Dread or Terror. Gyo is the best example for that, both the art and the writing start with small things, that nevertheless make you feel like they are omen of something really dreadful lurking around the corner. And Ito is actually someone who can follow that up and show us the full horror in graphical detail.
What starts with a small fish turns out to be an invasion of sea creatures. Sharks hunting people on land, beaches overrun by hordes of stinking fish of all size coming out of the ocean. But that isn’t where everything stops. While Gyo is horror, there are also SF elements, explaining what the reason for the walking fish might be. But that is just used to crank up the horror. Once the fish are on land, they’ll die because they can’t breath. Still, even in death they walk on, which is one of the reasons for the awful stench, they’re actually rotting corpses walking. But it’s not just a simple variation on zombie-stories, far from it. There are germs and they can infect across species. You’ll probably can see where this is going, but there also the walking contraptions the fish use. Which provides for some truly weird pictures later on, when the whole worlds has sled into a full blown apocalypse.
Horror, it is sometimes said, is best when the monster can only be seen out of the corner of the eye, a full view of whatever is lurking around will turn out to be much too mundane to induce the same terror. Gyo is the best proof that sometimes, if you have a really inventive talent at work whose art and writing match perfectly, that full view can turn out to be even more dreadful.
Rating: 5/5
Kagome Kagome (2000-2001)
by Toshiki Yui
fan-translated by Manga Translation
Three volume manga by Toshiki Yui that, untypically for him, contains elements of horror. Problem is, Toshiki’s manga so far have been on the lighter side of things, most of his early stuff was fluffy and light hentai (porn). Some of his more recent stuff tries to avoid outright porn, maybe this is an attempt to remake himself into more of a mainstream creator. Still, Toshiki so far lacks the sensibilities for creating true horror and whenever you get the feeling something truly horrible could happen he remedies that by making some of his characters say something non-serious or make non-serious faces. This truly makes it hard to take the more serious elements of the story serious. Still, it’s okay entertainment, Toshiki knows how to string his readers along. The ending is a complete deus ex-machina, but since the story that came before lacked real impact, it’s not really that annoying.
Rating: 3/5
Blackgas (2007)
by Waren Elis, Art by Max Fiumara
collects Blackgas 1-6 (first and second series)
This is Ellis doing the whole zombie-apocalypse thing. It’s violent as hell, blood and gore en masse flying around. It’s a fast-paced read that delivers all the action you can expect, starting on an island near the East Coast and following one survivor to the mainland, where the action (zombiefication, zombiekilling and so on) continues. There’s not much more to tell, since there’s not much story anyway, mostly action sequences. Overall it feels a bit pointless, it doesn’t do anything new (okay, the explanation of what the black gas actually does to the people is something new, but in the end it leads to nearly the same behavior seen in most recent zombie-apocalypse movies), nor does it leaves much of an impression after you’ve finished (even the ending, which might feel like an ubertwist to anyone who hasn’t seen dozen of horror movies, feels conventional to me). It’s like eating fast food, no real nutritions there. Still entertaining, if you happen to like mayhem, gore and zombies.
Rating: 3/5
Noogies (1999)
by Roman Dirge
collects Lenore 1-4
Maybe it was a case of wrong expectations, but this so much turned out to be not the thing I was interested in, that I had an extremely negative reaction. Published by the same company that also brought us Jhonen Vasquez’s excellent Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and often compared to Tim Burton’s work, Lenore is nothing more than a gag strip about an apparently undead girl. The problem is, it’s not very funny, which is quite understating the case. This is not just merely not funny, it’s so unfunny that it end ups in the negative zone of funny. It’s so inept at trying to be funny that it’s just sad. This is like watching Data from Star Trek trying to tell a joke. There’s someone who understand funny on a completely analytical level, that there are certain things, elements of narratives, that can be funny when used in a certain way. And then spectacularly misses the point when trying to use his knowledge to be actually funny.
Rating: 1/5
Chronicles of Wormwood (2007)
by Garth Ennis, Art by Jacen Burrows
collects Chronicles of Wormwood 1-6
One could argue that Ennis isn’t doing something new with Wormwood, again going on about religion, church, heaven and hell. But making the anti-christ the main character is a first, at least for me. Garth’s anti-christ doesn’t take kindly to his fathers plans of starting Armageddon and thus sets himself at odds with him. Secondary buddy characters are a reborn, black jesus and a talking rabbit. There’s also a road trip to heaven and to hell. But the main concern of the story is free will, not whether it actually exists in a biological sense, but rather whether humanity should be allowed to use this godgiven gift to determine it’s own future. Aside from these thematic concerns, it’s a fun (Wormwood is a producer of TV-Shows, which is good for some excellent and witty jokes) and entertaining comic. And Ennis writes a sympathetic and human anti-christ. What more can you want?
Rating: 5/5
