Graphic Novel Feature: Frankenstein Story Collection by Junji Ito

“All of my friends are dead… Their shadows whisper in my heart…”

The master of horror manga brings the world’s greatest horror novel—Frankenstein—back to life.

Junji Ito meets Mary Shelley! The master of horror manga bends all his skill into bringing the anguished and solitary monster—and the fouler beast who created him—to life with the brilliantly detailed chiaroscuro he is known for.

Also included are six tales of Oshikiri—a high school student who lives in a decaying mansion connected to a haunted parallel world. Uncanny doppelgangers, unfortunately murdered friends, and a whole lot more are in store for him.

Bonus: The Ito family dog! Thrill to the adventures of Non-non Ito, an adorable Maltese! (Goodreads)

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We all have that one (or more) author that when we see his/her title on the shelves, we automatically buy. No matter how many books there are on our TBR, we read it as soon as we get home. You know that drop everything you’re reading and READ THIS kind of moment?? Well, Junji Ito is one of those authors for me.

I haven’t read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley yet but it is on my list. I just don’t have classics as my priority to be honest. However, reading it through Junji Ito’s vision I am now convinced I should read it sooner rather than later. I love how the story blurs the line between monsters and humans, and how it reminds us that there may actually be limits to the pursuit of human knowledge.

This book is a short story collection, and Frankenstein is just about half of the book. I love anything with multiverses so I really enjoyed the additional tales of Oshikiri. Junji Ito took the scifi theme, added his signature horror twists and gave us haunted parallel worlds. What more can I ask for??

Now I hope you like horror because some of the photos I’ll be sharing can be really creepy 🙈

Enjoy ✨

Overall Rating: 5/5⭐️

About the Author

Junji Itō (伊藤潤二) Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister’s drawing and Kazuo Umezu’s comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby — even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga.

The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. For example: A girl’s hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister’s skin, etc.

Ito’s universe is also very cruel and capricious; his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order.

His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town’s obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town’s inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen.

Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her — only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate.

In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu, Tomie was adapted into a movie. Since Tomie, many of his works have been adapted for TV and the cinema.

Buy Links

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