Junji Ito’s second Liminal Zone book collects four stories, none of which are especially good, though they all contain great art and the occasionally entertaining scene.
Demon King of Dust is set in an abandoned hotel in an abandoned city involving a convoluted story of generations of actors doing evil things to their housekeepers - demonic forces inevitably come into play!
Village of Ether sees a group of friends go to a remote town in the countryside (always a great premise for a Junji Ito story) and find an entire village consumed by perpetual motion machines(?!) - demonic forces once again come into play!
The Strange Hikizuri Siblings, Chapter 3: Uncle Ketanosuke sees Ito return to his Addams family (if you want to read the first two chapters about them, they’re in the collection Lovesickness). This time those nutters are trying to resurrect their dead uncle - demonic forces, etc. etc.
The Shells of Manjunuma is about a small town that has weird turtles with human faces carved into their underside shells. The local crows pick them up, drop them on the highway for trucks to run them over, then eat their flesh and drop the face shells onto the property of the townsfolk - whoever’s house it lands on, that person later dies.
Demon King of Dust was pretty boring, as was Village of Ether, but both had some cool images - Village of Ether in particular has some of Ito’s most complex art. Uncle Ketanosuke was really boring but had a funny scene in it at least. The Shells of Manjunuma is sorta creative but its setup feels rather too complicated to seem disturbing or scary.
Hilariously, like in his first Liminal Zone book, Junji Ito spends the Afterword basically apologising for the crappiness of the preceding stories! He repeatedly talks about how he’s out of ideas so that he has to develop even the flimsiest premise - he singles out The Shells of Manjunuma - into a manga to meet his deadlines!
At least the guy’s honest, but also, considering all he had to go on in his idea notebook for Demon King of Dust was “dust horror” and “pulley horror” for Village of Ether, it’s pretty amazing that he was able to extrapolate such original, twisty stories from basically nothing.
While with every Junji Ito book you get great art and weird, unique stories, the ones in his Liminal Zone books are among his least interesting - and so it goes with The Liminal Zone, Volume 2. Check out Lovesickness, Frankenstein, Shiver, or Moan for collections of his better manga.
No comments:
Post a Comment