Uzumaki
Uzumaki: Spiral into Horror

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This is still my favorite Junji Itoh's piece of work. From top to bottom, every nook and cranny of this series is everything that most horror manga should take as a study case. I'm very glad it's going to get a good anime adaptation because surely a lot of people are going to love this series a lot. The story tells about the curse of the spiral that took over the small coastal town of Kurouzu-cho in Japan. It isn't just about that 'Oh, the spiral taking over, it's going to be spiral everywhere.' Spiral everywhere is one part, but what's more interesting and creepier ... about it is the way the Spiral haunts the city and people in the town, being described throughout the story to show that even if it's just the spiral, it could have been worse than you would have thought. Amazing horror manga, you need to read this if you like horror pieces of stuff.

I have to be honest, I wasn`t that impressed with the ending. But this always happens because when something is so iconic and over-hyped you expect a life-changing experience almost. At one point the manga started to lose the plot. And the ending is rushed without a good explanation as to why all of that happened. It is just blamed on the curse without any origin, reason, or pattern. All in all a lot of plot holes were there, that would have made the story aaaa loooot better. The art in the manga is amazing, no doubt about that. You can read it just for ... the sake of it, but it is not a must-read I would say. I did enjoy it at times it made me think about human psychology and I guess that was something the author was focusing on throughout the story. I would give it an 8.

I heard so many good things about Uzumaki before finally deciding to read it.
I had high expectations for this book, but I was so disappointed.

All of the characters are unlikable, bland, irrational, or complete weirdoes. This ensures that no tension can ever be built, because I absolutely do not care what happens to any of them. The best example is a character towards the beginning of the story who becomes increasingly obsessed with spirals. His family becomes concerned and we watch him spiral into madness. Props for thematic storytelling. I was initially invested in this plot thread ... and I saw promise in this setup. I liked exploring his weird psychological issue and wanted to see how it escalated.

So the payoff is that this absolute weirdo stuffs himself into a basket and breaks all his bones so that he can be shaped like a spiral. I assume this was meant to be spooky scary body horror. Props for the art. It is very well drawn. But I just started fucking laughing. After this, Uzumaki becomes a weird goofy comedy. But it's not funny for long, and it isn't scary, either. It's just stupid. It started off gripping and engaging and then completely shits the bed.

This story has very little in the way of coherent logic. Completely outrageous things happen all the time, and I guess you're supposed to take them at face value while questioning nothing. By the time people started turning into snails, I was just so uninvested in every weird little thing that proceeded to happen.

I'm going to give some of Ito's other stories a try eventually. There's no doubt in my mind that he's an extremely talented technical artist, and he is demonstrably very creative, but this just doesn't do it for me. I think my expectations were just too high going into this. A lot of that is my fault. But I also blame you fuckin weird Uzumaki people for hyping it up so much.

If you enjoy campy B-movie horror, you may get a kick out of this. But don't go into this book because of all of those people who say it's a life-changing masterpiece of psychological horror with complex philosophies and themes. It is not, and those people are dumb. You will not learn anything from this book. It will not change your perspective. It will not challenge
your beliefs. If that's what you're looking for, as I was, I'll save you some time. These are the three most profound questions Uzumaki will ask you to consider :

"WHY IS THIS CHARACTER ACTING SO DUMB"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS EVEN HAPPENING"

"HOW DO PEOPLE ENJOY THIS MANGA"