Junji Itō
Junji Itō ( Japanese 伊藤 潤 二 , Itō Junji ; born July 31, 1963 in Gifu Prefecture , Japan ) is a Japanese manga artist . He is best known for his horror manga, including Uzumaki and Tomie ( 富 江 ). He has already published over 30 books.
As a child, Itō was enthusiastic about Kazuo Umezu's horror manga and later called this mangaka his main influence. In 1987, when he was employed as a dental technician , he took part in a competition for the Gekkan Halloween magazine, a horror manga magazine for teenage girls, and won the Umezu Prize, a young talent award for horror draftsmen. In the same year he started his manga series Tomie about a girl who is immortal and who drives men crazy with her beauty. Tomie was later continued and includes several books. This was followed by further work for the horror magazines of Asahi-Sonorama- Verlag, Gekkan Halloween and Nemuki . However, all of these did not come close to the length of Tomie and were mostly short stories or short series.
Towards the end of the 1990s he began to draw for the first time for the mainstream magazines of Shogakukan , one of the largest manga publishers. From 1998 to 1999 he created one of his best-known works for the magazine Big Comic Spirits with the approximately 570 pages in three edited volumes Uzumaki . This is about a young person who lives in a city whose residents develop an unnatural affinity for spirals. The residents are obsessed with the spirals and go crazy. From 2001 to 2002 Gyo ( ギ ョ ) appeared, in which running fish chase lovers.
The draftsman continues to publish with Asahi Sonorama. From 2002 to 2003 he created the series Yami no Koe ( 闇 の 声 ) for Nemuki . He regularly draws short stories for the same magazine.
His work is translated into English, Italian, Portuguese and French. Since 1999 several of his mangas have been implemented as real films; especially the seven film adaptations of Tomie and the Uzumaki film were successful.
In addition to Kazuo Umezu, Itō counts the manga artists Hideshi Hino and Shinichi Koga as well as the writers Yasutaka Tsutsui and HP Lovecraft among his influences. Masanao Amano judged that his works were "beautifully drawn" and that the atmosphere was "like a nightmare unbearable" . He stated that he had "a style of his own, in which comedy is recognizable somewhere in the midst of horror."
Individual evidence
- ↑ Masanao Amano: Manga Design . P. 86.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Itō, Junji |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | 伊藤 潤 二 (Japanese) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Japanese manga artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 31, 1963 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Gifu Prefecture , Japan |