Junji Ito and the Art of the Uncanny

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point.

Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is using it to argue how artistic detail (or the lack thereof) can help an artist connect their reader to a character or setting. In omitting visual details and simplifying character designs, an artist can make their story more relatable to the reader because a reader is less likely to see themselves in a detailed, photorealistic face. The less details that are seen on a page, the more room a reader has to insert themselves into it. But McCloud also mentions how the opposite approach--using more detail to separate the reader from the world or character--can be used to an artist's advantage. In my opinion, Junji Ito is a master of manipulating the reader through detail. He often uses generic, if aesthetically appealing character designs for his protagonists, recycling simplistic faces, clothing, and hairstyles between his stories to bring the classic "everyman" hero to life. He also likes to set his stories in places that should be familiar to most, splitting his worlds between quiet, orderly suburbs and peaceful, picturesque countryside. He lulls his readers into a false sense of security with art that is initially recognizable and "safe," and as the story goes on and the horror elements start to creep in, he adds more detail to make his world more frightening and alien. This can be seen in nearly all of his published works, but for the sake of this assignment, I chose this single page from his horror short "The Window Next Door." Per traditional manga layout, the page is read from right to left:

Source: “The Window Next Door by Junji Ito.” Imgur, 1 Nov. 2014, https://imgur.com/gallery/MiQqGaX.

Without any knowledge of the pages that come before, what would you say this story is about? We can correctly assume that the boy seen in the first panel is our protagonist, as he is drawn with minimal detail and staged so that we can "see" the following panel through his perspective. The dialogue also tells us that he has just moved into a new house, and--based on how much detail has been put into the creature in the second panel--this is the first time he's seen his new neighbor. The reader shares the protagonist's horror because the creature is drawn to look like it doesn't belong in his world. The art shows us how inhuman the creature is from his perspective by making it stand out from everything else we see as the reader. Where the protagonist and his window are drawn with comparatively little detail, the creature and her(?) window are painstakingly inked to show every grotesque boil. Is the creature looking at the boy? Is it looking at us? That's for the reader to decide, and Ito masterfully blends the line between fiction and reality by showing us that no matter how far we are from the world he's created, we can be drawn into a sense of danger with nothing more than a few bottles of ink and a piercing stare.