Junji Ito is still the best horror comics artist around

Comics are a very difficult medium to use for scaring someone. In other media, horror relies on anticipation and implication. The artist knows when and how you’ll experience the story. Comics yield some of that control — it isn’t possible to force people to only see one panel at a time. This doesn’t make comics an inferior medium for horror, it just makes it unlike most others — and it can be hard to find a creator that is effective at scaring you.

Junji Ito is not. He is my comics artist boogeyman, capable of regularly lulling me into a false sense of security before — bam! — he hits me with a terrible image that I cannot scrub from my brain, a page that will just sit there, on my bookshelf, haunting me and beguiling me for being so impressively Twisted.

But maybe you’re not sure if Ito is for you, and you want one of his more chill works to see what the fuss is about. Mimi’s Tales of TerrorThis week’s is an excellent way to get your feet wet in the Ito water. Ito is a great way to spend time with friends who are also Ito fans. What the heck? you can text each other back and forth about 18 times when you read Ito’s story about jacked-up balloon people, or Uzumaki. It is a sprawling work about a town cursed and obsessed by spirals. It will soon be an Adult Swim Miniseries.

The collection is a compilation of short stories that have been out of print for a long time, based on an anthology in Japanese of urban legends. Mimi’s Tales of TerrorFollows Mimi, an undergraduate student as she experiences strange and unexplained events. The stories are less grotesque and more bizarre.

There’s a drawback to this: Mimi’s Tales of TerrorIto is not the best showcase of what he does. Ito stories are excellent for creating a feeling of palpable fear. His clean linework and dark inky backgrounds introduce characters with almost dolllike appearances, who seem incapable of the macabre twists they’ll endure. Then, his panels explode in grotesquerie, or cosmic horror. Mimi’s Tales of Terror is Diet Ito instead — GoosebumpsClive Barker is not the author.

Image: Junji Ito, Hirokatsu Kihara, Ichiro Nakayama/ASP

What is the best way to get in touch with you? Mimi’s Tales of Terror is great at, however, is surfacing an underappreciated aspect of Ito’s work: He’s so damn Goofy. There’s a wry wit and playful curiosity to the legendary mangaka’s horror comics, one that’s easy to overlook given some of the artist’s aggressively dark work, like Black ParadoxIt is a story about people meeting to die by suicide. Ito is a happy and well-adjusted cartoonist who has a difficult time raising his cat. He often tells tales about obsessions, which are an occupational risk for him. Ito’s obsession in his stories makes people apathetic Strange, and their strangeness can be contagious — frightfully so.

While the stories are in Mimi’s You can find out more about this by clicking here.n’t quite good at showcasing Ito’s craft at purveying scares, they are good at peddling oddity — like “Grave Placement,” where a yoked bodybuilder enjoys flexing in a cemetery, or “The Woman Next Door,” a story about one of Mimi’s neighbors who has a bonkers secret, one that is never really explained or commented on after it’s revealed. That said, there are moments where you get a sampling of this contemplative, moody foreboding of Ito’s more celebrated works, like in “Seashore,” a story about a woman who sees the spirits of the dead washing up in the surf, where Ito spends a two-page spread on a loving depiction of the ocean. Or the haunting, mournful ghost story “Just the Two of Us,” about an orphaned girl who refuses to leave Mimi’s side.

Ito’s unfussy, efficient storytelling can make his characters feel thin and his endings abrupt, but it’s moments like this that show why he’s a master of the form, and why he’s so good at scaring people with comics. Comics are a deceptively active medium — a series of moments suspended in time and juxtaposed against one another, where the reader unconsciously stitches them together to create meaning. Ito’s work thrives on this collaboration, inviting you to pause on images both horrific and mundane, to get lost in them, to make them more than they are without your imagination. Like any horror writer, Ito can make you scream, but not nearly as loud as you could.

Mimi’s Tales of Terror The book is now available at bookstores Viz.com Tuesday, Oct. 24.