Museum of Terror, Volume 1 Book

This is horror, now, so watch out if you you just had breakfast. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Tomie is horror manga, a huge collection of stories and only volume 1 of all the Tomie stories Ito did!! I heard from one reviewer that the second volume is a decided up-tick in quality, which I appreciate knowing, but I am not sure I really have to read another 400 pages of this story, or of this theme, which is in every story. I am not as obsessive as Ito or the hundreds of boys driven mad by Tomie.

Tomie is a supposedly gorgeous (this is manga, so it's difficult to create the kind of wild beauty he is going for in this style--cute you can do, as in Yotsuba, but gorgeous?) teenaged girl who makes particular boys she meets fall madly in love with her. How mad, you ask? That would seem to be the point, actually! These boys literally go crazy, they lose their minds, and for some not quite clear reason they kill Tomie to relieve themselves of the agony of lust. Why not just have sex with her, you may well ask? Tommy seems very much to invite this. And well, some of them do, but this is not so much a manga about sex as it is about crazy desire, blood, murder, and Lovecraftianly gross images. Sex would be too nice for Ito to depict.

But never fear, Tomie-lover-readers, if you grieve her loss. She has the power to regenerate herself from, say, her own decapitated head. Any body part will do, actually. Or preferably each and every body part, so we can drive all lusty boys to the charnel house or to death. There's blood everywhere in these stories. And in photographs some guys take of her you can see these gross Tomie-growths coming from her very head. Yuck, unless you are into horror, and then you will be so happy.

Freud help me, but I think there might be some Calvinist guilt issue running though this obsessive story where EVERY boy that lusts after Tomie must destroy the object of his lust and also be destroyed for his lust. And there's nothing particularly new in the stories, no real surprises, or any sort of real development, this is just a collection of individual Tomie stories, where he works out the same idea a slightly different way in every story. And you know, it is pretty masterful for its intentions. I actually liked it, anyway!

I have to call this a femme fatale story, as with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' somewhat less successful Fatale noir series, where the beautiful blonde bombshell also draws men to madness and suicide and murder in different stories across the ages. In Museum of Terror it happens similarly, but is just straightforward horror, which works better than the horror noir crime approach of Brubaker and Phillips. But I do like both. I really do.

Read Eisnein for the very best review of Ito, hands down. As Eisnein points out, Ito has a history of horror obsession that might just be unparalleled in the history of literature. In Ito's Uzumaki, for instance, he manages a creepy horror manga based on the increasing proliferation of . . . spirals. 800 pages of spirals, yes! Everyone driven crazy in a small town by spirals, everywhere, and increasingly, taking over everyone's minds. Which I liked even better, actually, it's so strange. But you see what I mean about the obsession issue with Ito. When he gets an idea, he hangs on to it for years. ..

Ito is amazing. And successfully creepy, especially if you are a horror fan!