Betwixt: A Horror Manga Anthology Review (Ryo Hanada, Aki Shimizu)

Betwixt looks like another Junji Ito book - same publisher, same format, same genre - and, though he draws the cover and provides a foreword, this is actually a horror manga anthology from other creators. Half of them are Asian, the other half are American, so the book is divided into stories from the two halves and you can read it either way - the traditional manga right to left, or the western-style left to right.

It’s not a great collection - none of the six stories are especially brilliant and half are instantly forgettable. These ones are: Ryo Hanada’s Kamei, which is about a kappa (water yokai) and some kid; Aki Shimizu’s Film Ephemera is about a guy who can see ghosts and has one haunt his house when he starts collecting posters of Being John Malkovich; Huahua Zhu’s Shadow is about a stray cat that seems to have brought evil into its new owner’s house.

I liked the concept of Shima Shinya’s The Window, about a window that must stay permanently shut as each time you open it to look out, you see a ghostly woman - and each time you open the window, the ghost gets closer to the window… It’s little more than a premise though so it’s not the most satisfying of reads.

Similarly, Michael W. Conrad and Becky Cloonan’s Never Left has an interesting idea at its core. Two friends are reunited after 13 years apart - but why did the one friend disappear to begin with? As they go ice fishing, one of them makes a startling discovery in the ice water… The story’s a little contrived but I can forgive that given the space constraints of the format. Cloonan’s art is great as always and I liked the open-endedness of the ending - still, this story again feels like the opening act to a larger story than a self-contained one.

Sloane Leong and Leslie Hung’s Mirror, Mirror is about a young woman who discovers a haunted mirror whose reflection unleashes a “better” version of herself into the world that lives the life she wants. It’s not the most original concept but it’s a compelling one so the story isn’t a total bore.

Betwixt might interest horror manga fans, though I wouldn’t say it’s a must-read as the quality isn’t really there, and more casual comics readers can easily skip this one betwixt other, more promising choices - you’re not missing much by doing so.