Word: octopuses
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...Japan. The wealth of material being imported far outpaces the amount and quality produced domestically in the horror genre. Three outstanding recent releases range in style from a twist on the teenagers-in-peril subgenre (Junji Ito's Museum of Terror) to extreme gross-out humor (Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl) to a disturbing medical thriller by Japan's most revered comix creator (Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito...
...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...
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...
...Davy is half octopus, half man, and his crew seems to have been recruited from the Star Wars cantina of yore, though they have even worse skin problems and are covered with the kind of slime that has recently become fashionable among the villains in fantasy films. They are not very menacing or scary and neither are the threats they pose to Jack and his pals. There's also a whole thing with a giant squid that may put such ancients who attend the senior matinees in mind of Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942). And that...
James Martin, an editor at the Jesuit publication America who has written critically about Opus, offers a middle ground between Dale Carnegie and the octopus: "Opus Dei provides members with an overarching spirituality for their life," he suggests. "It's an ongoing relationship that helps buttress and further shape the thought of people who are already conservative Catholics. That's a powerful symbiosis, and there's a personal connection between members, whether they're housewives or politicians. It's not an evil empire, but that doesn't mean there aren't serious issues that need to be addressed...