The popular Japanese horror manga magazine Asahi Shimbun’s Nemuki+ shared some thrilling news last month on February 13th for supporters of the famous manga artist Junji Ito.
They reported that Ito’s iconic horror series Tomie, about a mysterious and malevolent girl who cannot seem to die, is getting a brand new one-shot manga.
This new Tomie one-shot is called Tomie: Control and it will come out in the next issue of Nemuki+ on April 12th. To celebrate this new Tomie story, Ito will also be providing an exclusive Tomie cover illustration for that issue of the magazine.
So horror manga fans can look forward to reading the eerie new Tomie tale and seeing Ito’s latest creepy Tomie art when the April 12th issue of Nemuki+ hits shelves.
Junji Ito’s Tomie Manga Gets New Short Story
The horror manga series Tomie was the first published work by famous Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito. He originally created and submitted it to Monthly Halloween, a shojo horror magazine that ran from 1987 to 2000.
Tomie ended up earning Ito the prestigious Kazuo Umezu award back when it first came out.
The disturbing manga about a malignant immortal girl has spawned numerous film and television adaptations over the years. There is a whole series of Japanese horror movies based on Tomie that were released from 1999 to 2011.
More recently, a Tomie streaming television show was going to be made for the now-defunct platform Quibi before it was shut down.
What Tomie Is All About
Students in a high school classroom are mourning after hearing that their classmate Tomie Kawakami has been viciously murdered and cut into pieces.
They are shocked and saddened that such a horrific fate has happened to Tomie, whom they knew as a cheerful and stunningly beautiful girl. She did not deserve to die in such a cruel way.
But then to everyone’s surprise, a girl who looks exactly like Tomie suddenly walks into the classroom, smiling and apologizing for being late.
She has the same gorgeous appearance as Tomie – slender, with a beauty mark under her left eye.
This starts the mystery around the seemingly supernatural Tomie.
Any men who become infatuated with her beauty find themselves overwhelmed by a dark urge to violently dismember her, which many give in to.
But each time Tomie is killed, she comes back to life again, continuing her twisted hobby of toying with men’s affections.
More About Junji Ito
Junji Ito is a famous Japanese manga artist known for horror stories. Some of his most popular manga series include Uzumaki, a 3 volume saga about a town obsessed with spirals, and Gyo, a 2 volume tale where fish are taken over by bacteria called “the death stench.”
He has also created The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection, which compiles many of his creepy short tales, as well as Junji Ito’s Cat Diary, a self-parody manga about Ito and his wife living with their cats.
Ito’s horror manga has attracted a huge cult following over the years. He is considered an iconic artist in the horror genre. His disturbing stories have been adapted into both live-action Japanese films and anime series, such as the Tomie movies and the Junji Ito Collection and Junji Ito Maniac anime shows which animate many of his scary manga shorts.
Junji Ito’s interest in horror started very early when as a young child he began reading manga like Mummy Teacher by acclaimed horror manga artist Kazuo Umezu.
Ito’s older sisters would read Umezu’s scary stories as well as other horror manga, which Ito also started reading.
Ito grew up in the countryside near Nagano. In the house where he lived, the bathroom was located at the end of an underground tunnel where there were spider crickets crawling around.
These sorts of creepy childhood experiences later influenced and inspired his horror manga.
Ito first began drawing his own manga around age 4, taking cues from the horror stories he enjoyed reading in magazines. He continued creating manga as a hobby while pursuing a career as a dental technician starting in 1984.
Ito struggled to balance both his day job and passion for drawing horror manga.
In 1987 he submitted a short horror story to the manga magazine Monthly Halloween, where it won an honorable mention in their manga contest judged by Kazuo Umezu himself.
This story ran in the magazine for 13 years and eventually became Ito’s breakout manga series Tomie.
