ALL STAR RECOMMENDS FOR OCTOBER 31ST
Monsters Within, Monsters Without: 10,000
Pages of Kazuo Umezu
By Cameron Ashley
Happy Halloween!
Life has wedged itself firmly in the way of the production
and scheduling of this column, but here we are back on this most spooky of
days. Me being busy and all, I totally botched the fact that I wouldn't back for
Halloween and so a ready-to-go column was shelved and the little number below
that I wrote several years back for somewhere else was dusted off and hastily
reanimated for the occasion. Hardly a triumphant return to the virtual pages of
All Star Recommends, but an appropriate one as it's a lengthy look at the work
of an undisputed master of horror comics, the profoundly influential Kazuo
Umezu.
Have a super scary day and regular service will resume
shortly.
COMICS OF THE WEEK: SELECTED WORKS BY KAZUO UMEZU
It was in 2003, during a three-year stint teaching English
in Japan, that I first encountered the work of Kazuo Umezu. A student of mine
named Hiroko grew up worshipping Umezu’s manga and she told me, if you’ll allow
me to paraphrase, of the creepiness of his stories, their suspense, the ability
of their author to tap into something quite deep rooted and quintessentially
Japanese. She promised to find something for me; a story titled “Snake Girl”, a
personal favourite of hers, and translate it.
Several weeks later, Hiroko had tracked down a chunky,
second-hand copy of something apparently called Bizareness! that contained
within its yellowing pages the multi-generational tale of a family battling a
snake monster, ‘Snake Girl.’ She had translated every single caption, every word
balloon, every thought bubble in pencil in the margins of the page and gutters
of the panels, and did a pretty good job, lacking only in some grammar and
natural expression that a professional translator would give the work. To this
day it’s one of my favourite possessions.
I opened it up to find a title page featuring a little
doe-eyed girl in a polka dot dress running for her life from some kimono-clad,
slithering, one-eyed reptile woman. My
initial impressions were that although the image was striking, well composed,
dramatically lit, it far too was stupid and cutesy to work effectively as
horror. Like the work of Astro Boy
creator and Manga-God Osamu Tezuka (a huge influence on Umezu) only with
thicker lines and a much more dominant use of blacks and trippy, pattered
backdrops. I flipped through it – more doe-eyed, schoolgirl sailor outfitted
girls, eyes glimmering like a picture of the cosmos, adorably clutching their
undoubtedly weighty schoolbags in front of them.
This was the Godfather of Japanese Horror comics?
Well, actually, yes.
There is no doubt Umezu’s story structures have dated. His
narratives are frequently derailed by ludicrous coincidental plot twists, often
in place to wrap up a short work with an “EC-style” shock, and massive amounts
of exposition. However, what I discovered upon reading ‘Snake Girl,’ was that
smuggled into all this cutesiness was a genuine sense of the weird and a remarkable
skill for composing dramatic and seriously unsettling sequences. There is a
structural theory that, in genre comics anyway, it’s not just your chapter cliff-hangers
you need to worry about when creating a serialised comic book – each page
should contain its own cliff-hanger, propelling both narrative and reader
onward, deeper into the plot and the two-dimensional universe created on the page. I’d put Umezu’s ability to do this up against
pretty much anybody, particularly through his set up of monster reveals,
impending violence/shocks or utterly outlandish plot twists.
In the Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods documentary,
Richard Metzger describes the Scottish writer’s comics as a “candy-coated
bullet.” There is no analogy more fitting for Umezu’s work than this, except
that it’s perhaps actually more like a candy-coated Howitzer round. It’s Umezu’s early background in Shojo manga (essentially cute manga for
girls) that I suspect is the source of the oddness. True, Osamu Tezuka drew many
“mature” works as well, but never with the same surrealist flourishes or
visceral gruesomeness. In an interview
with The Comics Journal, Umezu said,
“I drew girls very cute, very lovely looking. Maybe people liked the stories
because they liked the looks of the girls who were astonishing. I had a
technique where, when you turned the page, a horrible scene would hit you.
After that, I received many letters from readers saying they were afraid to go
to the toilet.” (1)
It’s not just about
the “horrible scene” though, anyone can do that. It’s about the set-up to the
horror and it is here that Umezu is a master. His “cute” Shojo-esque characters are seemingly designed to throw the reader
off the scent. When dropped into dark, disturbing and frequently nonsensical
situations, rendered with a pen that somehow inks from the collective
unconscious of the ten year-old, readers may find themselves slightly ill at
ease without knowing exactly why. The
best analogy I can think of is this: imagine Child-You picked up an issue of
old Dan DeCarlo Archie to find its
open-faced happy-go-lucky, “oh gee, which girl do I go for” characters being
crucified, stabbed, stalked by hideous shadow twins from the other side of the
mirror, eyed off through window-slits by cyclopean creatures with a
generational grudge, stranded in far futures where adult supervision turns
homicidal and witness to Jughead’s maiming and subsequent suicide attempts. A litany of twisted psychological horrors
waits beneath the pretty pictures. Umezu’s frequent use of checked and psychedelic
swirling Zip-a-tone backgrounds (a technique this comics grandpa dearly misses
in this age of lurid colours and computer effect motion blurs) not only heightens
the oddness but provides some truly retro deliciousness. At his best, his work
reads like the demented collaboration of David Cronenberg, JG Ballard in early
environmental disaster mode, David Lynch and Jack Kirby. At its worst, it’s the
wall-scrawling of a homicidal ten-year old, which is a pretty fascinating worst
case scenario when you think about it.
A true celebrity at home, “Kazz” (as Umezu is known) was
born September 3, 1936 and, from all accounts, did pretty much nothing but draw
from the moment he was first able to hold a pencil. He barely eats, fronts a
rock band, has a festival named after him, and it is apparently good luck to
see him wandering around his western Tokyo neighbourhood (2). He lives in a candy-striped home, matching
his outfits, and has the wide, open grin of one of his young protagonists. Clearly stricken with a Peter Pan complex,
Umezu seems to revere childhood the way Michael Jackson did only without the
creepiness – which is strange considering the nature of much of his work. Whilst
it is true that Umezu has done much more than pure horror (notably with a stint
adapting the adventures of Japanese superhero Ultraman and his gag strip
featuring the “scatalogically-obsessed wild child” (3) Makoto-Chan which became a merchandising sensation), there’s no
denying that horror is where he is most effective. Upon soaking up his huge
body of work, the reader will find more than just snake monsters and
genetically mutated, sentient chicken meat, they will find some pretty
ubiquitous childhood fears splashed across the black and white pages –
ugliness, deformation, alienation, rejection, vanity, sibling rivalry,
generational chasms, authority figures gone mad.
Never fear though, kids, for the playful Umezu, now
eighty-one years old, constantly smiling and clad in candy stripes, is still totally
on your side. He loves scaring you, feels “close” to you when he does so. It’s
pretty rare you can trust anyone over ten in Umezu’s world and even then our teen
heroes and heroines better watch their backs.
“Snake Girl” was collected with two other tales of the
terrifying reptile woman, “Scared of Mama” and its direct sequel “The Spotted
Girl”, in 2000 (from stories created in the late ‘60s) and subsequently in
English in 2007 by American publisher IDW. Australian-born artist Ashley Wood
was chosen by IDW to provide a cover to the English edition of Reptilia and Wood’s dark and striking
painting is effective, if stylistically opposed to the contents within. IDW's Reptilia is a treat, with the opening
two stories being classic Umezu and trying directly into the events of “Snake
Girl” (or “Reptilia” as it is known in this edition). In “Scared of Mama”, the
snake woman is locked away in a hidden ward of a hospital where young Yumiko’s
mother is recovering from an accident. The Snake Woman escapes from her cell
and, noticing the striking resemblance to Yumiko’s mother, switches places with
her and begins to assume her life. This is a frequent story trick Umezu uses –
the parent as literally other from the child and as we shall see as we work our
way through Umezu’s catalogue, one that never fails to be effective: what imaginative
child has never once wondered if his or her parents were really their own?
Of course, Yumiko knows what’s going on here and, of course,
she is the only member of her family who sees the snake woman show signs of her
true self – scales appearing on a shoulder blade, mouth creeping upwards in a snake-like
“smile”. Nobody believes her, naturally, and it’s up to Yumiko to expose this
monster on her own. From there, Yumiko is sent to stay with her cousin Kyoko in
“The Spotted Girl,” only there’s a stowaway in her suitcase – the snake woman,
escaped once more from what appears to be the Tokyo equivalent of Arkham
Asylum’s revolving door system. Midoro Village, Kyoko’s home, is also the home
of the snake woman (who lived in a now-dilapidated shack called The Snake
House), and poor Yumiko is up against it big-time here as the snake woman’s
venom turns out to be a virus which turns the infected reptilian. With an
entire village scared of snakes, this time the adults not only disbelieve
Yumiko, they blame her for bringing the curse of the snake woman back down upon
them, hunting the little girl and threatening to “capture and kill” her.
Umezu’s in fine form here, ramping up the paranoia and the threats as her whole
extended family is infected and out to get her.
Probably Umezu’s best-known work, the award-winning The Drifting Classroom was serialised in
the manga title Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972-1974. Despite being forty years
old, the work still packs some serious impact. A Tokyo elementary school
suffers a huge explosion and literally disappears without a trace, leaving
nothing but a giant crater where it once stood.
While parents and authorities grieve and try to ascertain what happened,
the school is somehow transported to a post-apocalyptic future Japan, where all
is wasteland, pollution, natural disaster and monster. Everything in this future is tainted – the
landscape an ominous, inky mass of tumorous-looking dunes.
Umezu said of the work, “I didn’t want to express it, but
behind my work I wanted to deal with pollution – exhaust gases, school boys and
girls suffering from itchy eyes, etc. According to some radio shows, the cause
of the itchy eyes was not because of the environment but because of the young
people’s psychological problems.” (4)
Following the Fukushima disaster, the premise of the series is perhaps now even
more potent than it was in the ‘70s and it will most likely be difficult for
any modern reader to not consider the disaster when reading.
Spanning eleven collected volumes from publishers Viz, Umezu
throws everything at his cast (led by sixth grade troublemaker Sho
Takamura). The adults, lacking the
imaginative capacity to grasp this impossible circumstance, are the first to
lose it – trusted teachers quickly turn homicidal and cafeteria worker, Sekiya,
barricades himself in the school food storeroom, hording the food and fending
off all assaults to remove him, killing adult and child alike with kitchen
knives and cooking oil fires.
The kids, of course, start off the series as unified. They
are imaginative and creative and, despite the panic, are able to process their
bizarre circumstances far more rationally than their adult supervisors, tied to
their textbook notions of time and space and the limited boundaries of the
possible.
The story moves at a lightning fast pace and the kids are
soon left to fend for themselves, with all the adults either dead or, in the
case of Sekiya, imprisoned. Takamura quickly takes charge, the little rebel
demonstrating an immediate gift of leadership, and with a democracy in place,
the kids begin to both work out where they are and how they will survive. It’s
of course not easy – plague, drought, flood, mutants, monsters and civil unrest
all come their way. One threat appears just as the last is (barely) handled.
Mistrust and misinformation spreads and the kids begin to turn on each other –
paranoia leads to some terrible decision-making and mob mentality leading to,
amongst other things, the crucifixion and immolation of a boy who is believed
to be responsible for their circumstances.
Heavy shit for 1973.
Even though the pace is relentless, the series truly hits
its stride with volume seven, where Umezu shifts the book into true body horror
territory. An odd, pimply-looking fungus
sprouts everywhere the kids turn, overtaking the plants they’ve tried so hard
to cultivate. To eat or not to eat, is the question, and of course several
students (numbers whittled down by this point), decide to eat. The mushrooms
quickly deform and mutate those who’ve partaken, leading to a showdown with
weird looking posthuman mutants, the only truly intelligent life left on the
planet.
The oddness continues – the kids worship a bust of
Takamura’s mother (with whom he can communicate – his voice somehow echoing
through time) as some sort of surrogate God-parent. Takamura’s mum has an odd
arc of her own as, back in the ‘70s, she begins by dealing with her grief, and ends up being
able to communicate with her time-displaced boy and running all manner of crazy
errands for him, planting packages everywhere for Sho to eventually find in the
future. She even stashes a medical kit in the cadaver of a famous baseball
player that the kids discover during their bizarre explorations of the terrain.
Spiralling into something like Lord of the Flies with monsters, from here the series gleefully nosedives
into a parade of child-on-child horrors. Split into two camps, one for Takamura
and one for his rival Otomo, a grisly battle for turf erupts and kids kill kids
in a bloody war for food and shelter. Umezu never flinches away from the
nastiness here – homemade axes slam into the heads of six year olds, vicious
running spear-battles take place and, desperate for food, Otomo’s camp even
descends into cannibalism. The sight of these once-cute, now haggard and
psychotic little characters cooking each other is honestly a little hard to
process. One Western reader even posted a review on Amazon saying he or she was
going to quit the series at volume nine as the cruelty with which Umezu treats
his characters was too much to bear. Viz should seriously use that as a blurb.
Perhaps traumatising a select group of readers further is
the fact that The Drifting Classroom
does not provide us with a happy ending – only a terse, resolutely Japanese
decision to make the best of a bad situation and a future quite literally in
the hands of our children.
The perils of vanity and the repugnance of physical
deformation are another of Umezu’s obsessions.
In “The Mirror”, beautiful young Emi’s life is turned upside down when
her reflection bursts free from her mirror and begins to usurp her life. In
“Fear”, beautiful Momoko is terribly disfigured after an accident, and her
younger sister Aiko, once ignored (Umezu loves his “Cinderellas”), now has to
bring pretty classmates home whose faces Momoko intends to use as replacements
for her own. Aiko, however, has her own secrets, and Umezu expertly twists the
knife in this story of youth confronted by the sudden and life-altering nature
of once beautiful flesh turned monstrous. The manger master says, “Fear is
created when certain conditions are met. One of these is physical appearances.
The more bizarre and ugly the imagery, the greater the fear.” (5)
Harbingers of doom and omens of peril also populate much of
Umezu’s work, from the black butterfly beautiful young Megumi sees in the evil
step-mother epic, “Butterfly Grave” (probably my personal favourite Umezu
story) to Mutsumi’s paranormal ability to see a blue flame hovering above the
head of those soon to die in “Blue Fire,” to Umezu’s enduring Cat-Eyed Boy, who
has the misfortune to make “something frightening” happen wherever he appears.
“Butterfly Grave” (reprinted
in English by Dark Horse in Scary Book
Vol.2: Insects) begins with the death of Megumi’s mother shortly after her
daughter’s birth. As Megumi grows, she develops a crippling fear of butterflies
that soon begin to appear to her right before death or accidents befall people
around her. It’s a little like Poe mixed with Japanese schoolgirls and Kirby
Krackle-like special effects with evil emanating from negative spaces. Umezu’s
art is refined and surreal here, with black dappled butterflies displaying an
affection for pointillism and inky smears and Megumi herself quivering in fear,
ironically bug-eyed at times, her tremulousness indicated by fine twitching
motion lines amid heavy black backdrops.
Of his atmospheric use of blacks, Umezu has said, “White
indicates a lack of matter, while black shows an abundance. It makes you think
that something is lurking just beyond, hidden in the blackness. We all know
that there aren't any monsters or snake women lurking in the shadows. But the
darkness creates the possibility that they might be!” (6)
Megumi senses that her new step-mother, an old flame of her
father’s, is evil. This being Umezu of course, no adult believes her weird
rants about “mother” being a butterfly, and she’s not – she just happens to
have a hidden birthmark across her chest, exposed in the story’s climax, shaped
like a blotchy butterfly that imprinted itself, in a fateful murderous moment,
upon the infant Megumi’s psyche.
Then there’s poor Cat Eyed Boy. Cursed with the truly bad
luck of either bringing misfortune or arriving somewhere just in time for
misfortune, this little boy with the cat eyes and strange little black jumpsuit,
cut off mid-thigh, is in a weird way Umezu’s Hulk – fated to wander Japan, ever
looking for a home, he’s hated and feared by everybody who’s paths he crosses
and blamed for every weird and horrific happenstance he’s in the slipstream of,
just like poor Yukiko in the first two Reptilia
stories.
Produced between 1967-1968, the near one thousand page
series begins with Cat Eyed Boy in almost an EC-style narrator role as, like a
cute Cryptkeeper, he emerges laughing from the shadows of an attic, seeming
malevolent, but really just there to bear witness to the unfortunate story of a
weird, regenerating zombie creature trying to take over a man’s family and fortune.
Cat Eyed Boy ultimately solves this problem by burning down the family home.
Now deprived of a place to sleep, he packs his bindle and hits the road.
Although he starts off as seemingly malevolent, or at the
very least a trickster with a nasty streak, his origin reveals that he’s a
forest-born cat goblin cursed with
too-human looks, leading to his expulsion from the monster community.
Yep, not just humans view our protagonist with suspicion – his own kind has it
in for him too. Taken in by a kindly spinster, baby Cat Eyed Boy is treated
with cruelty from the start, beaten and tortured by humans, even brutally
speared once paranoia over his appearance spreads.
Even though he flickers between hero and mischief-maker, Cat
Eyed Boy almost inexplicably remains on humanity’s side. Throughout his
travels, armed only with spit that turns poisonous when he’s angered (a trick
he could use far more often, if you ask me. I’m pretty sure Umezu, in the rush of churning
out pages simply forgot about it). Cat Eyed Boy encounters, amongst others, a monster
who grows as Cat Eyed Boy eats, Doctor Monster – a Moreau-esque figure fond of
transplanting animal brains into human bodies, Meatball Monster – a cancer
monster manifested by a family dealing with the disease, and The Band of One
Hundred Monsters – deformed humans who want to recruit Cat Eyed Boy and intend
to make pretty humans as ugly as their hearts.
And it’s here that we actually hit both the true heart of
the series and a theme which defines much of Umezu’s work – the true ugliness
of humanity, its greed, vanity and casual cruelty. Cat Eyed Boy serves as a
warning to us all, like an urban legend “be good or else” story. After all,
he’s constantly breaking the fourth wall, talking to the reader and suggesting
that he might one day come to sleep in your attic, of course just in time to
see whatever horrors you’ve brought on yourself. Cat Eyed Boy makes his way
through a world filled with depressingly awful people. Why should your place show
him anything different?
The character of Orochi functions in a similar fashion as
Cat Eyed Boy except that she’s an attractive girl with vague supernatural
powers, not a weirdly pixie-ish cat goblin boy. Of the series, only the fifth
and final book, Orochi: Blood (from
1970) is available in English and, to the newcomer, the titular character’s
appearance may well upset what is, up to that point, arguably Umezu’s most expertly-
crafted story opening. With Zip-a-tone
psychedelic backdrops in full effect, Umezu brings us the tale of two sisters
from an affluent family, one favoured by their parents, the other not and the
love they have for each other despite the favouritism. It’s a mesmerising
beginning, rendered in splashes and pages with only one or two panels and Orochi’s
sudden appearance is, from her very first panel, a total monkey wrench in the
narrative. She watches on as the sisters grow and, even as the story builds to
a satisfying and twisted conclusion, I can’t help but resent the character for shoehorning
herself in and derailing such a beguiling prologue. It is a visually beautiful
book throughout however, with Umezu’s lines thickening in moments of horror,
and a satisfyingly twisted conclusion rescues the narrative.
Between 1986-1989, Umezu worked on Right Hand of God, Left Hand of the Devil, the frequently gruesome adventures
of elementary school students Sou and his elder sister Izumi. Sou, like Cat
Eyed Boy, seems unable to stay away from horrific and paranormal events and his
first “adventure,” “The Rusted Scissors”, is easily the most bloody and
visceral thing Umezu ever created. Featuring a series of old, unsolved child
murders, a pair of old rusted scissors connected to the murders and a very
suspicious substitute teacher, Umezu pulls absolutely no punches here, with
Sou’s visions of scissors bursting through his sister’s eyeballs, slicing through
his own nose and, in flashback, the murderess snipping through her victim’s
cheeks, the ink pools on the page. “The
Rusted Scissors” is also one of Umezu’s more bizarre stories (and that’s saying
something by this point), with Izumi vomiting up torrents of mud, human skeletons,
and children’s toys, all from the underground basement where these long-ago
murders took place. From there, Sou takes on spider-women, the demonic return
of a teacher he actually had a hand in killing, the murderous father of a
crippled girl who details his killings in homemade picture books, and more, aided
by strange powers he is able to manifest through dream.
Labelled “Fantastic Neo-Horror” on the covers with zero
hyperbole, Umezu remains in good form throughout this later work, even if his
art has simplified – his Zip-a-tone basically abandoned in favour of spurts of
black-blood and thick motion lines. Filled with snapped, mangled limbs,
decapitated heads and other such extreme physical violence, Right Hand of God, Left Hand of the Devil
is packed with Umezu’s trademark violence-shock page turners, this time with
the vileness turned all the way up. The sight of a father about to fillet and
deep fry his naked, crippled daughter, for instance, truly does take some working
through. Yet, as weird as the series gets, it is no match for Umezu’s next long
form work, the mind-bendingly abnormal Fourteen.
Pound-for pound the most demented thing I’ve ever read,
Umezu’s Fourteen, created between
2002-2006, is an epic of ultimate comic book weirdness. Starring Chicken
George, a genetically-engineered chicken breast that grows into a genius
monster chicken-man tied into a cryptic prophecy of looming disaster only
fourteen years away, the series is a must for fans of truly oddball horror
comics. Chicken George sees himself as a representative of the animal kingdom,
dwindling after some man-made pollutant-based catastrophe, and after initially
vowing to decimate the remaining human population, decides instead to gather up
all the animals and, like some cosmic Noah, take them to the other end of the
galaxy leaving us wretched, stupid humans behind. Nut wait, that’s not all. American President Young co-stars, resplendent
early on in a black and white checked suit, desperate to crack the secret of a
rash of green-haired, plant-infected babies that are suddenly being born, of
which his newborn son, named “America” is one…Oh and Chicken George, genius
chicken monster, is somehow a graduate of Cambridge University…and he has a
talking chicken named Chicken Lucy for a companion.
I swear I’m not making this up….
Then there’s Grand Master Rose, Master of The Economic
World, obsessed with immortality, kept young only by the “Youthanizing” cream
made from “live hormones” of three year old children. She lives in a giant
building surrounded by the wasteland of this future Arizona, broken up only by
the huge jungle, the family garden, hidden under the desert. Chicken George needs to get off the planet,
Rose, increasingly haggard, wants immortality, through his experiments, George
has learned this secret. All he wants in exchange is the equivalent of two
years of the global budget to build his rocket ship. When all the world plant
life suddenly begins to die, the decision is made by the Government to
manipulate the media on a grand scale, creating a second, fake, disaster to
keep the eyes of the world glued to their screens whilst artificial greenery is
created. A full Hollywood production is planned to create this drama, which is
something like Stallone’s Daylight
with added magma. The impossibility of creating such a production dawns on Vice
President Martha, who then goes ahead and creates the disaster for real,
capturing it documentary-style, in the process creating a reality TV star with
whom Chicken George falls in love.
Over 260 chapters, Fourteen
recreates the world and the nature of the universe, with earth’s literal heart,
humans descended from dinosaurs, children rocketed into the infinite like a
host of cutesy Kal-El’s from Krypton, Umezu throws everything at his readers
here: mutated animals, desolate landscapes, looming apocalypses, fearsome
insects, disease and genetic experimentation. Yet despite being a truly
mind-warping cocktail, spiked with gloriously childish nonsense science, the
story is just way too long and somehow becomes ponderous, despite its
relentless pace, thanks to page after page of weeping and wailing politicians
and scientists, bemoaning the selfish nature of humanity that has brought our
species to the brink of extinction.
Boo-hoo indeed.
Despite my misgivings, the fact is that Fourteen is hands-down the single craziest comic book ever created
and we should all be thankful that such an insane and deformed genre mash-up
actually exists. I actually dare you to sit down and read the first 800 pages
of the book in a single sitting – you will come out of it feeling like you’ve
just been drugged. Umezu’s art lacks its former crispness and attention to
detail, looking something like a lazy Rick Veitch inked by a tired David
Lapham, but somehow it only serves to further heighten the childlike And then what happens? And then what
happens? insanity of the piece.
An obvious extension of The
Drifting Classroom, Fourteen,
like all of Umezu’s horror work refuses to give its readers a happy ending.
What it does offer, and this is a constant throughout the 10,000 pages of
comics discussed here, is a belief that no matter the horror, the struggle or
the difficulty, children can be tougher, more capable, more flexible, and
better able to lead than any adult.
Ultimately, Umezu believes that there is nothing wrong with
a good scare, despite the frequent depravity on display in his work. Horror is
a communal experience, shared from creator to reader or viewer. All Umezu wants
is to get close to you, by scaring and “astonishing” (7) you, so turn the page
and let him in. He’s not only one of the most unique voices in comics, but
everything he creates, he creates with unstoppable drive and utter joy. You
might not ever be lucky enough to have him literally cross your path, but the
Godfather of Japanese horror comics has scattered his imagination across
thousands and thousands of pages (and I have just scratched the surface here),
leaving a trail of highly crafted horrors for you to connect your mind with
his. And there is as much hope in these
pages as there is blood and weirdness. There are the warnings of any good fable
– greed and vanity chief among them – but there is strength through
perseverance and the knowledge that something better is out there for all of us
if we treat each other, and the planet we live on, with kindness and
respect.
NOTES:
1. The Comics Journal, #254, 2003, Fantagraphics Books, page 138
2. The Drifting Classroom vol.1, 2006, Viz Media, page 189
3. Ibid, page 189
4. The Comics Journal, op. cit, page 140
7. The Comics Journal, op. cit, page 139
Love your comics.
Love your comics.
