Junji Ito is still the only comics artist that scares me

polygon.com:

It is exceptionally hard to scare someone via comics. Horror in other media relies heavily on implication and anticipation; the artist always knows exactly when and in what order you will experience their story. Comics yield some of that control — it isn’t possible to force people to only see one panel at a time. This doesn’t make comics an inferior medium for horror, it just makes it unlike most others — and it can be hard to find a creator that is effective at scaring you.

Not Junji Ito, though. He is my comics artist boogeyman, capable of regularly lulling me into a false sense of security before — bam! — he hits me with a terrible image that I cannot scrub from my brain, a page that will just sit there, on my bookshelf, haunting me and beguiling me for being so impressively twisted.

But maybe you’re not sure if Ito is for you, and you want one of his more chill works to see what the fuss is about. Mimi’s Tales of Terror, out this week, is a good way to dip your toe into the shallow end of the Ito pool. Getting into Ito can be great fun, especially if you have a friend who is also an Ito-head. What the fuck! you can text each other back and forth about 18 times when you read Ito’s story about jacked-up balloon people, or Uzumaki, his sprawling opus about a town obsessed with, and cursed by, spirals. (Soon to be an Adult Swim miniseries.)

A collection of long out-of-print short stories based on a Japanese anthology of urban legends, Mimi’s Tales of Terror follows Mimi, a university student, as she encounters strange, unexplained phenomena. This means that this set of stories is a bit less out there and not as grotesque, just a brief tour through some weird and unsettling events.

There’s a drawback to this: Mimi’s