Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Little boys are made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.
Junji Ito is made of Maggots and offal and kitty-cats.
I discovered Junji Ito as a young high schooler browsing Borders. It was there I discovered the magic of “Uzumaki,” a few years later, I would win a DVD of Spiral at Bishonen Pictionary, only to be let down severely.
Now, I am looking into the maw of the beast. It has been announced that his apocalyptic series about legged fish invading Okinawa will be made into an anime.
You think Evangelion is apocalyptic? You think “Ghost Hound” was absurd? Gyo takes them, chews them into a fine cud, digests it in its four stomachs before it all explodes in a fit of bloody diarrhea. (You think I’m kidding, don’t you?)
I only hope for one thing: that the anime will be nothing like how they did the live-action adaptation of “Uzumaki” back in 2000 (very disturbing imagery and music by Do As Infinity). That was just unwatchable, even by my standards.
Tomo Hirai is a Shin-Nisei Japanese American lesbian trans woman born in San Francisco and raised in Walnut Creek, Calif., where she continues to reside. She attended the San Francisco Japanese Hoshuko (supplementary school) through high school and graduated from the University of California, Davis with degrees in Communications and Japanese, along with a minor in writing. She serves as a diversity consultant for table top games and comic books in her spare time.
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