Word: manga
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...various publishers of translated manga, Dark Horse comics has distinguished itself in publishing superior horror titles, releasing five different multi-volume horror titles this year alone. Among them were two that should not be missed: Junji Ito's Museum of Terror and Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl. Arguably Japan's premier horror manga-ka, Ito has a fevered imagination that has given us Uzumaki, about a town beset by spirals, and Gyo, about dead fish that sprout legs and wreak havoc upon the land. Museum of Terror (two volumes so far, $14 each) collects the so-called Tomie tales...
...cheeks become sallow as their will power seeps away. Rendered with a high degree of realism, Ito's drawings and storytelling more closely resemble Western comics than other Japanese imports. This makes them easier to read, in spite of being printed right to left like the other Dark Horse manga books. Full of satisfyingly graphic violence and ectoplasmic f/x, Ito delivers not just the required amount of gore but smartly expands on such commonplace terrors as the fear of losing oneself in a relationship. Though the mostly unconnected stories lack the satisfying arc of a novel, acquiring at least...
Where Junji Ito represents the classic horror style, Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl takes the genre to its comical extremes. Conflating the ultra-cutesy style of girl's shojo manga with outrageously repulsive gross-out humor, the three volumes so far ($13 each) may be the funniest books of the year, as well as the most disgusting. The first story of the first volume starts like a typical shojo book might, with a bunch of school girls tormenting their cute classmate Takako. But in this version, they jump on top her and make her lunch vegetables squirt out her nose...
...ballet slippers that won't let Takako stop dancing, ends with her excreting on herself to change the color of the shoes and release her from the curse. Like an outrageous drag queen that ramps up the "feminine" signifiers to extreme levels, Yamazaki tweaks the tropes of girl's manga up to preposterous proportions. Characters don't just cry, for examples, rivers of tears flood out of their faces. In another story, Octopus Girl competes in a beauty pageant. Everything is perfectly cute and delightful until centipedes pour out of a rival's outfit. "Dear God!" marvels Octopus Girl, with...
...classic “The 400 Blows.” We hear the class is relatively painless, though it is taught in French. Parlez-vous anglais? Non! A new offering, FC 85, “Japan Pop: From Basho to Banana,” teaches anime and manga, alongside other eclectic elements of Japanese popular culture. FC 72, “Russian Culture from Revolution to Perestroika,” taught by well-liked professor Svetlana Boym, offers Revolution-era avant-garde art, socialist realist works (including Eisenstein and the cinematic montage school), and other decidedly cool Russian stuff.Our...