Monday, October 28, 2024

Tomie by Junji Ito

 

(hb; 1987-2001 manga series, collected into the above-shown 2016 omnibus edition)

 

From the back cover

“Tomie is the girl you wish you could forget. She’s the one you shouldn’t have touched, shouldn’t have smiled at, shouldn’t have made mad. She’s oh so lovely—but you just might love her to death.”

 

Review

Ito’s first mega-successful manga series about a seemingly immortal and invincible girl you can’t kill is an unsettling, bold and often horrific work, about a bedazzling girl who seems nice for two seconds before her selfish demon side begins ruining her victims—usually anybody within her gaze and memory. While the structure of these episodic, expanding tales are essentially the same, it’s fun and interesting to see Ito’s early, emerging style and structuring (which lent itself to later, greater works) as well as the playful creativity of the myriad of ways that Tomie gets at her victims, often through initially innocuous ways. And of course the artwork is great.

Tomie has inspired nine live-action films (
starting with Tomie, 1998), at least one Japanese series and scores of other directly linked multimedia/crossover works. Worth checking out, this.


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