Reviews for Museum of Terror, Volume 1

The average rating for Museum of Terror, Volume 1 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-01 00:00:00 Thomas Price Junji Ito has an imagination that is pretty impressive; he can wring 800 pages out of an idea that would utterly confound most writers. How many cartoonists could create a horror masterpiece about SPIRALS? Where would you even start? How about dead fishes on robotic spider-legs? WTF?! And yet he bites down on these crazy-ass concepts with remarkable tenacity and seriousness. The 'Tomie' stories were among his first, about a beautiful school-girl (why is it always schoolgirls? Do women cease to exist in Japan after their 18th birthday?) who is murdered by an infatuated student, only to show up in class a few days later like nothing happened. Again and again, she has men and boys fall in love with her, manipulating her obsessive suitors in a cold and unnatural way, until she is inevitably hacked to pieces by one of them. Over the course of the 850-or-so pages of Museum of Terror: Volumes 1 & 2, Junji Ito demonstrates his preternatural gifts as an artist and storyteller, beating this dead horse into a furry puddle. As thoroughly fucking weird as the story gets, it's always entertaining; and Ito's artistic evolution is fun to watch as well. What does it all mean? Nothing. Ito is able to repress the authorial urge to sermonize, so his horror remains horrifying for the sake of wonderfully crass entertainment. There is a serious paucity of quality horror titles in the Western comics tradition, making the masters of manga horror like Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu, Hideshi Hino, Suehiro Maruo, & Kentaro Miura* all the more important for fans of the genre. *(Berserk has become many things in its sprawling, 35-year history, but horrifying supernatural monstrosities & sickeningly inventive carnage have always had a home in the black, cancerous heart of this fantasy epic.) The story seems to imply from the start that Tomie is somehow the instigator every time some sick fuck goes at her with a yanagiba and turns her into sushi... which might trigger PC accusations of misogyny or victim-blaming from the self-righteous, virtue-signalling fans of Recreational Outrage. But there is no political agenda or subconscious sexism at work here, just a desire to freak readers out with crazy, near-incoherent ideas. To answer a relevant question I posed half-jokingly earlier: the 'schoolgirl' thing most definitely has been fetishized in manga. But this fetish appears primarily in the Shonen genre, which targets school-age boys who are naturally attracted to the teenage girls wearing the famously sexualized uniforms. And the Shojo genre features schoolgirls because schoolgirls are its laser-targeted demographic; surprisingly - to me, anyway - these gory, disturbing tales by Ito initially appeared not in Gekiga anthologies for adult manga fans, or Shonen manga magazines for blood-crazed boys... but in a Shojo anthology. 'Tomie' was Shojo horror, made specifically for teenage girls, before finding widespread popularity and acclaim with every demographic in its collected Tankobon format. So... yeah. I think that might prove a point of some sort. And as the stories get longer and the art improves, it's clear Tomie has only her superficial beauty connecting her to the female gender & humanity in general. Her hyper-seductive sexual magnetism is like the bioluminescent lure of an Anglerfish, and the young puppet-boys are more like prey than prospective mates, used & discarded. By the end of the first few tales, there's no doubt that Tomie is a virus in human form, and that the zomboy suitors are critical to spreading the Tomie-Virus when she orders her own destruction. Mentally controlling men and boys like love-sick zombies, the Tomie-virus subconsciously flips a switch that turns her zomboys into psychopathic butchers when she's ready to 'reproduce'... the process of dissection just ends up spreading the disease. Each dismembered chunk of her body gradually turns into another Tomie, in a properly disgusting way. This leads to power struggles between the various copies and their respective devotees. Dark Horse published two more volumes in the 'Museum of Terror' series, and the second one collects the rest of the Tomie stories. More Art-book Reviews More Comic-book Reviews More Novel Reviews

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-21 00:00:00 Glen Sumailo 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!