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Holes That Consume You When You Give Them A Name

I have found a lot of my favorite comics and the like on weird message boards and image sharing sites like Imgur. There is one that continues to pop up over and over again, Junji Ito's horror comic/manga "The Enigma of Amigara Fault." It has become popular in some weird corners of the internet because it, to an extent, is terrifying.

The premise is that an earthquake uncovers a fault on the Amigara Mountain, and on that fault are these odd human-shaped holes. People have started traveling to the mountain after the holes are shown on TV because they keep seeing holes that are they believe are theirs, holes that match their bodies exactly. They feel compelled to enter their hole as if something (or someone) is making them do it. They are unable to escape their draw.

As I was reading Understanding Comics, this comic came to mind. McCloud suggested there is a triangle with three vertices, reality, language/meaning, and the picture plane. The characters in this comic take these holes that are vaguely human-shaped, call them their own, and then enter them, walking into the darkness until they are stretched until they become almost noodle-like people. It is not very clear what happens to them once they enter the hole. All we know is that they are never seen again. Over the course of the comic, we see the transition from each vertice in a very unique way.

Ito takes these abstract iconic images and gives them meaning through having their characters describe and name them and then actually enter them so that these realistic faces begin replacing these black blobs. By the end, however, the holes have become so warped that they lose their human shape and the people inside them can no longer be seen or heard, thus giving the image back to the more abstract picture plane.

McCloud stated that "Icons demand our participation to make them work. There is no life here except that which you give it" (59). Those empty holes had no meaning in the comic until the characters gave them meaning and decided they were meant for them. In the same vein, nothing on the page below had any meaning until I decided to give it meaning.

I struggled with picking a particular page or series of panels from the comic because I wanted to show pieces of each section of the comic. I ended up choosing one of the last pages when the main character finds his hole and finds himself unable to keep himself from entering it.


The character here is giving meaning to the hole. He decides it is his and then enters it. If he had ignored it or never seen it, it never would have had meaning. It is only once he sees it and decides it is his, that it becomes meaningful. 

After rereading this, I am now going to have nightmares about finding my own hole and disappearing into it. If you feel up to going down the same weird hole with me, you can read it for free online here. I would highly recommend checking out more of Ito's work if you are interested in horror comics, as well. 

Works Cited

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. HaperCollins, 1994. 

“The Enigma of Amigara Fault - Junji Ito (Long but Good).” Imgur, 14 Dec. 2013, https://imgur.com/gallery/ZNSaq.

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