Tomie was serialized in various manga publications for 13 years and remains one of Ito’s best-known works, inspiring a nine-installment film franchise and an episode of Netflix’s upcoming anthology series Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre. Ito submitted the story to the magazine’s Kazuo Umezu Prize competition, where he earned an honorable mention in 1987.

Ito’s first published story, Tomie, appeared in the pages of a shojo magazine called Monthly Halloween. In Japan, manga for young adults is divided into two main categories: shojo manga, which are popular with pre-teen and teenage girls, and shonen manga, which are typically marketed to adolescent boys. Ito got his start in the pages of a horror magazine aimed at teenage girls. While customizing dental appliances, Ito learned hand-tooling techniques that he would later use to modify pens to make them easier to use or more comfortable to hold. (He began drawing manga professionally about halfway through that tenure.) When the demands of doing both jobs became too grueling, Ito said in an interview that he “decided to go all in on manga.” But while his medical training helped him acquire a general knowledge of anatomy, it was his experience making dentures that most impacted his work as a mangaka, or manga creator.

His work as a dental technician shaped his art in a surprising way.Īfter high school, Ito spent nearly six years working as a dental technician. Ito has said he felt a strong connection to the material as a young child, explaining that horror manga was like a “parent” to him, “just like a duckling thinks the first person it sees is its mother.” 2. The first manga Ito remembers reading is Umezu’s Mummy Teacher, and he has since named The Drifting Classroom, about an elementary school that is somehow transported to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, as one of his most important influences.

Ito’s introduction to manga came courtesy of his two older sisters, who had books by influential manga creators such as Kazuo Umezu ( The Drifting Classroom) and Shinichi Koga ( Eko Eko Azarak). Junji Ito started reading horror manga when he was about 5 years old. Ito has since become one of horror’s most revered creators, writing and illustrating long-form masterpieces such as Uzumaki and Gyo as well as unforgettable shorts like “The Hanging Balloons,” “Glyceride,” and “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”-that is, when he’s not drawing Pokémon or publishing funny, charming comics about life with cats.įrom his first encounters with manga to his diverse range of artistic influences, here are a few things you might not know about the reigning king of horror manga. It’s been 35 years since Junji Ito debuted on Japan’s manga scene with the first installment of Tomie, a long-running tale of a demonic young woman whose beauty drives her lovers murderously insane.

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