Museum of Terror 2: Tomie 2

I was visiting my parents in Ohio for a few days, and I packed kind of light, but luckily I store most of my old manga at their house when I’m done reading it, so there’s a bunch of stuff there I haven’t talked about here yet. I realized awhile ago that I had somehow neglected to talk about the last two volumes of Museum of Terror despite the fact I complained bitterly when the series was cancelled, so I thought I would fix that.

Seriously though, I was really shocked that this series had low sales. Junji Ito is… well, the most accessible of the horror manga artists I can think of. I like Umezu and Hino well enough, but some of their stuff can be batshit insane (Umezu) and/or the same story or type of story told over and over again (Hino). Ito has a more traditional feel, a balance between psychological and gory horror, and I appreciate that a lot. I always secretly hope that Viz projects will revive things like this (the reprintings of Uzumaki and Gyo, for instance, or the success of Drifting Classroom or Cat-Eyed Boy giving Scary Books new life), but sadly, it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

The first volume was material I had already read in English, but this volume was all new Tomie stories, newer stuff… possibly newer than Gyo and Uzumaki, but I can’t verify the dates. The art looks very good though, and these are probably better Tomie stories than the ones in the first volume. The only thing I can complain about is that it’s almost too much Tomie, but that’s because I read this entire 400-page volume in one sitting. I saved myself the overdose the first time through by breaking the stories up over the course of several days.

The stories in this volume are a lot more striking than in the past volume. Instead of constantly preying on students, Tomie branches out into the world of adults and young children. The high schoolers aren’t completely exempt (a story about girls planting her hair on their heads springs to mind), but there’s more variety in these later stories. Tomie ruins the life of a young boy she somehow gets to call her “mama,” she makes two grown men throw the pulped remains of her body into the sake vats, making the most intoxicating alcohol known to man, and she gets adopted by an elderly couple she runs a con job on.

I actually don’t like Tomie that much, and I don’t like Tomie stories as a result, but I really like the number of situations Ito writes for such a limited subject (a girl who bewitches every male she runs across to the point they become her slaves and must kill her). Even though Tomie’s not my favorite, I wouldn’t trade this volume for another since Ito is quite good at short stories.

It can be pretty gory in a cartoony, non-graphic way, and there’s also some genuine weirdness and eccentricities mixed in as well. I’m not going to be able to convey how well Ito can write short horror stories, but they are superb, and these volumes give you a LOT of story for your buck each time. I’m just so bummed the series got cancelled though, I was very much looking forward to huge volumes filled with Ito short stories for years to come.