Junji Itō has left his job as a dentist to become a full time comic book artist. Itō surely took inspiration for his horror stories from older Japanese artists, such as Hino and the beloved Umezz, but he immediately showed his original and strongly distinguishing style.
Unlike his predecessors's meagre and caricatural style, he uses a careful, elegant, and heinous graphic realism, that is violently effective, thanks to his exhaustive medical and anatomical expertise. Likewise, his works show a rare capacity of comprehension and expression of the most hidden and twisted bottom of human nature, as well as of structures, deformity, and monstrosity of the contemporary consumer society.
Therefore, even if his body horror attracts and impresses the mainstream public, Itō fills his works with subtexts – from psychopathological introspection to social criticism – achieving the often tricky goal of being pop and intellectual at the same time. His main themes are disorders of perceptions, obsessive compulsive somatizations, ancestral fears, self-destructive behaviours, alienation.
Developing his art, Itō draws liberally on other expressive forms, such as cinema (Hitchcock, classic sci-fi, b-movies), literature (Lovecraft, King), painting (Dorè, Escher, Bosch).
Many of his works have been adapted into animations and live actions, most of the times based on Itō's scripts.
Junji Itō will be one of Lucca Comics & Games guests in collaboration with Star Comics.
