Junji Ito

Junji Ito (Japanese伊藤 润 二, Itō Junji, born July 31, 1963 in Gifu Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for his horror comics, including Uzumaki and Tomie (富 江). He has published over 30 books.

Itō was inspired as a child by Kazuo Umezus horror manga and called this mangaka later his main influence. 1987, when he was employed as a dental technician, he took part in a competition of Gekkan Halloween magazine in part, a horror manga magazine for teenage girls, and won by these terms and the Umezu Prize, a Young Investigator Award for horror illustrator. In the same year he began his manga series Tomie about a girl who is immortal and by her beauty drives men crazy. Tomie was continued later and includes several books. This was followed by additional work for horror magazines of the Asahi Sonorama -Verlag, Gekkan Halloween and Nemuki. However, this all came not to the length of Tomie approach and were mostly short stories or short series.

In the late 1990s he began to draw the first time for the mainstream magazines from Shogakukan one of the biggest manga publishers. For the magazine Big Comic Spirits he created from 1998 to 1999 with about 570 pages in three anthologies comprehensive series Uzumaki one of his most famous works. This is about a teenage girl who lives in a city whose inhabitants develop an unnatural affinity for spirals. The residents are obsessed with spirals and crazy. From 2001 to 2002 appeared Gyo (ギョ), follow a pair of lovers in the ongoing fish.

However, the artist published in Asahi Sonorama continue. From 2002 to 2003 he created for Nemuki the series Yami no Koe (闇 の 声). For the same magazine, he regularly draws short stories.

His work is translated into English, Italian, Portuguese and French. Since 1999, several of his manga have been implemented as a live-action movies; especially the seven film adaptations of Tomie and Uzumaki movie were successful.

Kazuo Umezu Itō side counts the manga artist Hideshi Hino and Shinichi Koga and the writer Yasutaka Tsutsui and HP Lovecraft to his influences. Masanao Amano ruled that his works were " beautifully drawn " and the atmosphere was " unbearable nightmare -like ". He stated that he had " his own style, in which the midst of horror and comedy is recognizable anywhere. "