Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection

I found “Deserter” to be one of the most interesting complications that Viz has released throughout the years. I would certainly recommend checking out his established classics such as “Uzamaki”, “Shiver”, “Tomie” and others prior to purchasing this collection if you are a newcomer to Ito’s work. With that being said, some of Ito’s greatest stories lie within this collection, including “Long Hair in the Attic”, “Bullied”, “Village of the Siren” and “The Unendurable Labyrinth”. It’s interesting to watch Ito’s prowess as an illustrator advance with each story, as the opener “Bio-House” is rough (yet still effective and has a very lofi quality), yet none of these stores are on the level of his later masterpieces such as “Uzamaki”, “Gyo” or “Remina” in terms of detail.

So Junji Ito ... my wife is addicted to his writing and manga ... so when he was at SDCC ... I knew I was in trouble.So we went to his speaking engagement and the man is really brilliant (honestly I had no idea who he was prior to this) ... I felt bad for him because his hands are very badly gnarled because of years of drawing. But no one can take away the horror he inspires with everything he writes and draws.He creates horrors that give nightmares horrors ... the things he writes and draws is amazing and terrifying and beautiful at the same time. The stories are all enthralling and tell tales that will give you nightmares but you will soon realize that even your nightmares pale in comparison to the nightmares he is writing. It's truly awe inspiring to be honest.One day we will lose this horror genre master but for now, I recommend everyone buy his books and be both inspired and terrified.

Arrived safely and fast. Nice edition from VIZ a must have for any manga horror fan and good addition for Ito collection.

Since I haven’t found a list of all the stories in this collection I’ll just write them for you in case you were wondering what was included:1. Bio House2. Face Thief3. Where the Sandman Lives4. The Devils Logic5. The Long hair in the attic6. Scripted Love7. The Reanimators Sword8. A Fathers Love9. Unendurable Labyrinth10. Village of the Siren11. Bullied12. DeserterQuick opinion which means nothing: This book isn’t as good as Shiver (nothing is) but as good as Smashed and Tombs. Wayyy better than Gyo.I found the stories to be much sadder than others. They seem to have more depth and have endings for the most part.My favorite from this was probably a Fathers Love. It wasn’t scary but depressing. Bullied was great but my least favorite because it was depressing in a different way lol.In any case if you love Junji Ito you’ll appreciate this! Enjoy!

Huge fan of Junji Ito's work. I love his art, story telling and characters. I will give everything he makes a 5 star.

I like to the packaging of this book came sealed and I believe all booksellers should follow.I haven't gotten to the story yet but that is a small detail that I really appreciate.

Even the greatest mangaka, when all of their work is stretched out and seen up close, will come up uneven, and Junji Ito is the same. While some of our greatest storytellers' juvenallia live buried in a shelf somewhere (my understanding is that Nabokov, for instance, wrote three unpublished novels before publishing, while some of Hiroya Oku's works died on the vine, unfinished, untranslated, and uncollected), Viz's ambitious, comprehensive and apparently lucrative approach to Ito means we don't merely have the master storyteller of Uzumaki, Tomie, one or two masterful collections of stories, an award-winning adaptation of Frankenstein, the schlocky but superb Gyo, and some Sunday funnies featuring cats.On the contrary. We have an uneven ouvre. We have a guy who has bad days. A guy who works when he's inspired and when he's not inspired, but has a germ of an idea worth fiddling through for the sake of working, making paper, or because his adoring fans are eager to hear what's on his mind, even if there's...not much on his mind.Ito even talks about this in his notes to The Dissolving Classroom, when his editor encouraged him to produce while he felt he had little to say. And we had the pleasure of reading lesser Ito in that manga, but I'd argue it was mature Ito, and as such it was worth it.But back to juvenallia, those first semi-succesful stabs at developing a voice. Deserter is Ito's juvenallia. It is Ito as a mangaka still figuring things out, like the Beatles in Hamburg. You could even say there are some covers in this collection. And that some of those covers are at times plodding and unnecessary.Early stories in this collection look crude, but are an intimate look at a man wanting to tell stories. They are distinctly Ito in how they touch on body horror, absurdism, and hidden wickedness. They are also derivative, their lines loose and executed without much editing. They are also bloody, bloodier than later Ito work.Much of this work isn't especially gripping, either. The tales are wandering, feel overlong, and at times overwritten. While the elder statesman Ito can indicate a certain doomful, insidious decay that will haunt the rest of a story with a few lines trickled out of a beautiful panel, this collection's young Ito will spend an entire page stuffed with dialogue of a newscaster explaining that babies are going missing. Then, this same young Ito will fill several pages with an ailing father laying out the plot to his daughter, hammering the reader over the head with the how and the why of it all, draining any mystery from the tale. Meanwhile, we don't exactly ever KNOW why people are curling themselves into impossible spirals in the masterpiece story cycle of Uzumaki. We just know that primal, self-destructive way in which, when we obsess, we feel we can lose control of our minds and our bones as we venture further into the fixation we dread as much as we cherish. That's where Ito eventually GOT, but he had to start somewhere.It's interesting that, given the frequency and mixed chronology of these Viz Media editions, we can read the modern, somewhat directionless but absurdly beautiful and at times hilarious Black Paradox in the same year as these younger, lesser, early stories, many of them made available for the first time in this era of manga being elevated to it's rightful status in the west.As such, I'd say this beautiful volume is one for the completionists. Those who would like to see Ito sparring with his desire to tell stories and make art, but someone who has not yet found their rhythm.Others not looking for this may be turned off. I certainly found some of the stories to be a chore to get through. But I've also read a good 60 pages of stories about this guy's love-hate relationship with his cats, so I pushed through. I'd never recommend this to someone who really, really liked Uzumaki, but found The Liminal Zone to be just okay, and wanted to know if Ito had written any other bangers. I'd recommend this to the completionists.That said, for those of you still in the fence: the two final stories of this volume are real bone chillers. They don't exactly feel like hallmark Ito stories in some ways. They're kind of icky, mean, Poe-inspired, almost gut-wrenching. As such, for Ito's die hard fans- when you get to 'Bullies,' stash your phone, turn the lights low, and prepare for a young mangaka starting to go super-seiyan. It will be worth it for those, like me, who have the patience and curiosity to watch a beloved mangaka laying the foundation of something that became monumental.

I currently have all of Junji Ito's works, and I have to say, these stories are really good. Its really nice to see his earliest works. Junji Ito is truly a great writer and artist!