Museum of Terror: Volume 1

This manga by masterful artist/author Junji Ito features Tomie, a seemingly immortal young woman whose beauty is only outmatched by her cruelty. As some women inspire men to write ballads, so too does Tomie inspire her suitors - except instead of writing poetry, they feel compelled to tear her limb from limb! Strange, for sure, but also vastly entertaining. In a series of vignettes, Ito fleshes out Tomie's reign of terror in which her sympathetic and not-so-hapless victims struggle for survival. Gruesome and hilarious, this first volume in the Museum of Terror series is an excellent addition to any manga collection.

Tomie is the object of everyone's desires. Obsession would find her attractive, and desire would covet her hand. The problem with Tomie is that she's not only beautiful but she's also cruel, becoming the proverbial barb that claws at the skin of every one of this flower's bearers. Not able to part with - or even share - her, the men (and sometimes women) in Tomie's life are drawn not only into love but also into a cycle that hopes to possess her - even to the point of killing her and not really understanding why. Sometimes this leads to some really gruesome points, with some people not only dismembering her but also grinding her to pulp or becoming stagehands in even more novel acts of morbidity. The thing about that is that Tomie doesn't really take to being dead long - killing her only gives rise to more Tomies and they are never happy with each other or the offending party involved. If you've never seen the work that Ito does, he is masterful with horror scripts and illustrates with a macabre sense of delight as shadow and depth crawl through a world of both light and dark and make something - beautiful. Few really seem to do black and white well but Ito excels at it, putting together a portrait of strange happenstance that are sometimes amazingly bleak and sometimes just amazing. I've been a fan of his work for a while now, really enjoying the three Uzumaki books he did, and I thought that I'd actually seen everything he had to offer when The Museum of Horror bombshells went off by me. I was stunned, to say the least. For anyone that read the older English collections of Tomie (myself included), you only found yourself reading partial variations of a much larger story. Ito himself attempts to explain this in the back of the 1st new book, saying that the old books had been put together by grouping what the Tomie stories were about more than when they came out. This led to many a confabulated look and many an incomplete piece of work, with stories not meeting in sequential order and whole panels missing. The variety of mistakes was huge, too, and might have been somewhat funny if not for the fact that, along with the missing pieces, there were also missing stories. When I say missing stories I mean a missing volume; when you take the 1st collection of books and hold it to the new editions you can tell that both of the original Tomie books could fit into the first book. So, the Museum of Horror books are good buys. The 1st book is basically a sequential volume that tells tale after tale of Tomie, beginning with a really twisted story and ending with some rather twisted means. The tales included in this volume are: Tomie, Tomie Vol. 2, Basement, Photo, Kiss, Mansion, Revenge, Waterfall Basin, and Painter. While many of these connect outright, some connect in more subtle fashions and follow characters that are, for a lack of better wording, caught in the web that is Tomie. Of these stories I found myself really liking the beginning and perhaps

This collection includes most of the original Tomie stories, and gives a really amazing peek at Junji Ito's earlier art style. The lines are clear, and the characters are depicted in a deceptively simple and beautiful manner. But the story itself is a twisted virus-meets-vengeful ghost tale about a girl (Tomie) that never dies. More than that, she provokes the intense desire and fixation of the men she meets, which invariably ends in them murdering and mutilating her. It's an amazing manga full of SICK STUFF and the plot and scares are very visceral; The story also hints at and vaguely throws around some gender politics (and gender violence!) in the subtext. With Tomie, Junji Ito doesn't just spin one linear tale, but a sortof MYTHOS around Tomie that unfurls with each chapter. Like, hmmmm-- is she like a parasite that encourages being killed and mutilated as a form of her own propagation? Is she more like a virus that infects and changes to suit the weaknesses of her 'hosts'? Admittedly, it can get repetitive, but especially with the first volume, it's really effective in a big dose. The last panel of the final story in this volume is SO. SO. CREEPY. I yelped like a scared kitten and just threw the damn thing on the floor. If you feel like you've seen Tomie around before, it's probably because the now-defunct publisher ComicsOne originally released some of Tomie in a two volume set. Yeah, previous to the Museum of Terror edition, the Tomie comics were VERY out of print, and cost a ridiculous amount to track down secondhand. Like a lot of ComicsOne editions, their printing of Tomie was shoddily translated, edited and the visual touch-up (signs in English, sound effects) were really awful. The company basically (as the rumor goes) packed up shop, stopped paying their bills and disappeared. The pieces and rights were later acquired by DR.Master and some of their more successful stuff got assimilated into the new company's catalogue. As for the second volume: The SECOND volume is also entirely Tomie stories, but it's mostly previously unpublished stories from when Junji Ito revisited the character in 1999 & 2000. You can feel him really escalating the limits of the Tomie 'mythos' here, with the depravity hitting really nasty levels... Making SAKE out of Tomie's mashed up flesh? Slashing her face over and over with a RAZOR? It gets ugly, but I found it really fascinating to see him draw these stories in his later style-- the more detailed, shakier line style he explored in Uzumaki and his newer comics. I am ready for a new subject after hundreds of pages (and more than a dozen variations) on the Tomie tale, but it's pretty sweet to have the entire story in 2 hefty volumes. As a final note note, the ordering of the stories in these two volumes reflect Junji Ito's own choice of how he wanted the chapters to be presented, as another reviewer has noted.

One has to wonder after reading anything created by the brilliant mind of Junji Ito just how stable that mind really is. Having been turned on to his work first through his Uzumaki series (which by the way is a fully engrossing and rewarding read) I was only too happy to by chance stumble into this, the first book in Dark Horse's Museum of Terror series. Within these pages lurks the story of Tomie, a high school aged girl whose striking beauty is only matched by her vanity and lust for attention. The horror begins after Tomie is brutally murdered and dismembered when, only a few short days later, she suddenly reappears at school acting as though nothing had happened. What starts as a macabre mystery gradually descends into something much more gruesome as the chapters progress, and the secrets of Tomie's strange character are revealed. Many of the chapters have very little to do with each other save for Tomie's relentless reoccurrence, and you can almost guarrentee that, 4 times out of 5, you'll see her die (usually a more hideous death than the one before), regenerate, and come back again to torture all those whom she comes across. Apart from the complexity of the stories as well as that of Tomie's sinister character herself, it is also a treat to see how Ito's illustrations evolve as he develops his own signature style. This development seems almost charted by Tomie's own physical transformation throughout the book. She evolves as Ito's illustrations do so that, by the final chapter, we are able to see Tomie in the way that Ito wants us to see her; as a hauntingly beautiful young woman. Over all, it became clear to me after reading Museum of Terror that it is not just Ito's objective to write good horror; Ito it seems has striven to break our stereotypical assertions as to what the horror genre is. In fact, he's done something nearly unheard of. He's taken the blood-and-gore factor and made it genuinely scary again.

For those who are curious -- and I know there are a number -- yes, this and the following volume contain all of the stories in the earlier Comics One editions. The differences are pretty substantial, however -- even down to structure. This is the first complete, in-sequence publishing of Tomie in English, including chapters not previously published and setting the chapters in chronological order. Beyond the substance of the book, the new volume is a marked increase in quality of printing, localization, formatting, and layout. It just feels like a professional package. Thick, too. Also to note, as this doesn't seem common knowledge, these "Museum of Terror" books aren't merely reprintings of the earlier Comics One volumes; rather, they're direct localizations of a recent Japanese series of the same name, that aims to collect Junji Ito's entire body of work (as printed in Monthly Halloween), in order, for posterity. At the moment Dark Horse has picked up the first three volumes, including all of Tomie and a few years' worth of one-off stories (only one of which, I believe, has been released here). Presumably if people show enough interest, they'll continue the series and bring over the rest of Ito's work. So! If you want a complete high-quality numbered set of Ito's work, this is the place to begin. If you're content with the Comics One editions, that's fine -- though know that you're missing a bunch of material. If you're new to Junji Ito, again, no better place to start than the beginning.