Product Description

Museum of Terror volumes one and two introduced readers to the horrific, beautiful creature Tomie... the woman no man could resist. Now Junji Ito, creator and curator of this horrible museum, brings a new type of exhibit to thrill and chill your senses! First, his lovely violinists will escort you to dinner in a vampire den. Next, in a classroom full of grotesquely masked students, which one is a demon in disguise? A musician's possessed arm attacks a schoolgirl by way of his mouth, and another young man listens to the tape recording left behind by a suicide victim. Why did she kill herself, and is he safe from its influence? Swordplay, monk-ridden ruins, halls of upright corpses, infectious radio broadcasts, and murderous ceiling hair are among Ito's beastly offerings in this volume! Find out why Junji Ito is Japan's foremost creator of horror manga!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173981 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

Customer Reviews

More. More!
I can still remember deliberating in a high street bookshop over whether or not to buy the first 'Museum of Terror' volume: on the one hand, the somehow shoddy-looking cover art made it look like something sort of second-rate, but on the other, I was interested in writing short horror comics, thought myself something of a Japanese horror fan (thanks to anime, videogames and films) and crucially, since this was an anthology of several self-contained works, I reasoned it was value for money and might help me think up my own ideas, by observing what range those works inhabit.

I was only initially disappointed to realise that all the works in that first volume were extensions of the same idea - the character of 'Tomie' and her endless resurrections - less the 'Twilight Zone' diversity I'd pictured and more of a franchise like Freddy Kruger. Only initially disappointed, mind, because each new Tomie tale in that first volume reiterated the subject in such a variety of disparate frameworks that in them I saw creative extrapolation I never would have dreamed possible, and became that day a Junji Ito admirer.

The same was true of the second book in this series (which follows Tomie again) and of Ito's 'Uzumaki' trilogy which takes the unpromising, flimsy-sounding premise of a town obsessed with spirals then (literally) drives it into the ground while you watch in breathless wonder.

But this third Museum of Terror is what I thought I was buying when I got the first: self-contained, unrelated horror stories. Some of them, like 'The Face Burglar' and 'Heart of the Father' put most other 'horror' comics (with their endless recycling of zombies & vampires etc) to shame; almost madly inventive, yet still rooted in easily recognisable experience. Others, like 'The Unbearable Maze' or 'Sword of the Re-animator' are noticeably weaker, at least by Ito's standards. But even these are fascinating, because this is his early work, with shinier gems to come!

So it is extremely frustrating that Dark Horse will be publishing no further volumes in this series due to lack of sales. If you like horror, or are bored of 'horror' because you think you've seen all there is to see, you owe it to yourself to purchase this volume, and any other Ito you can.

Then you need to email Dark Horse and add your voice to the demand for the other 13 books to be translated and printed. Meanwhile, I'll have to learn to read Japanese.