Tomie, Vol. 1 TPB
Story:
Art:

Written & Art by Junji Ito
Price: $9.95

Contents:

• Six stories about the titular character

My Verdict: Eh, if you're into that kind of thing.

Her name is Tomie, and she's a very cute young student. She seems so cute and attractive...you just want to hack her into bits. But don't get too bent out of shape, because she won't stay dead. No matter what you do, she'll come back and you'll go mad with desire for her.

Horror is something that there's not enough of in comics these days. Out and out horror is something that's hard to do correctly in any medium, thanks to movies like Scream--since all the genre is to a lot of people is something to make them jump in their seats. But no, what I want out of horror is that lingering afterburn where you are just disturbed out of your mind. Gore is easy. Making people jump is easy. But getting in under their skin and slapping them around? That takes work.

Now, if there's one thing I'm not completely familiar with, it's Japanese horror. That's the case I'm pleading when I say that if you, like me, aren't familiar with it--you should probably skip this one. Apart from a couple of bizarre incidents involving photographs, it seems to be a potluck of twisted happenings, revolving around Tomie. She can regenerate, she eats flesh, she can inhabit normally inanimate objects...she's evil without direction. She just gets hacked apart eventually and keeps right on ticking...and that's about it. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy dismemberment as much as the next demented comic reviewer, but after a certain amount of it, I want a little gravy to go along with my grit.

And that's basically it--each story consists of Tomie enthralling somebody then driving them nuts and/or getting a bunch of people killed and/or growing strange tumors. She's essentially a Cenobite in a sailor suit.