Manga fans sick of the science fiction, hentai, romantic, crime, magical girl, and space fantasies stories that have saturated the English manga market can now be healed by the horror genre. Though many manga series involve a certain amount of horror, none have really fit the Western mindset of contemporary horror seen in major American motion pictures. That is, until now.
Junji Ito's Tomie series has been brought to the English-speaking world via Comics One. Tomie is a series for any card-carrying manga aficionado. The series is about a beautiful high school girl with a bit of an attitude and a trail of men, including her teacher. On a field trip Tomie threatens to tell everyone about her relationship with her teacher if he does not leave his wife. Tomie's high school boyfriend, who is not too happy with her speaking to any other male, interrupts the conversation between the two. They get into a violet argument, which results in Tomie falling to her death. The teacher decides that it is best for the class to protect their classmate. The classmates decide that this is the best option since Tomie was not exactly the most loved person. So they chop her up into forty-two pieces, one for each of her classmates to discard.
Unfortunately, the pieces of Tomie are able to regenerate into new Tomies, and several days after her funeral, she returns to school healthy and happy. Just one thing, Tomie's boyfriend and teacher begin to go slowly insane, becoming paranoid, irrational, and violent and soon the new Tomies begin to appear, driving any man they come in contact insane and left with an insatiable need to kill their regenerated version of Tomie by stabbing her to death.
Tomie Volumes 1 and 2 is a series of short episodic stories with no real relation to another (stay tuned for the review of volume 3 coming in December 2001). Ito is a masterful storyteller and artist. He abandons the traditional manga style drawing that gives an unprecedented reality to the series. I particularly like the fact the Ito's characters look ethnically Japanese. Ito also masterfully catches the psychotic, neurotic, and fearful emotions of Tomie's victims as if he used a camera. I especially like the facial expressions the murderers took when they murdered Tomie. There was fear, hate, jealousy, and joy all in one scene.
The only problem I had with the two volumes was that on several occasions there were holes in the story. I do not know if this was a result of translating the series into English or the fact that the story is a teen horror thing and that is just the way the original was. But this phenomenon was rare and overall Tomie was a phenomenal series. I applaud Comics One for taking the step to introduce true horror manga to the English world. Domo Arigato Gozaimasu.
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