This adult animated film (from 1997, re-released by Deaf Crocodile) left me with a question: where has Bill Plympton been all my life?

Well, drawing, obviously (his illustrations were once in every men’s magazine). A better question: where have *I* been all of *his* life? This rocked from beginning to end, and was the most fun I’ve had with a movie in a long time.

I call it an *animated film* with some reservations—Plympton’s drawings are thrillingly dirty and itch like a hair stuck to the inside of your mouth, but they remain *drawings*. There’s little attention spared for the temporal language of animation (timing and anticipation and so on), and it’s largely filmed on threes and fours—characters don’t flow, they jerk and stutter. These cost-saving measures soon become part of the film’s scrappy, relentless charm. It’s a descendant of those extremely early 1910s cartoons (think *Mutt and Jeff* and *Krazy Kat*) that were basically flipbooks of moving images. Plympton’s art has a visibly constructed quality that I quite like. As noted in the accompanying audio commentary, Bill Plympton would often erase a drawing and then redraw on the same sheet, meaning you sometimes see ghosts and afterimages of erased work in the final shot.*

^[1]*I was reminded of Will Vinton claymation—the way he doesn’t seem to care that his clay models have fingerprints and bulges and so on. A lot of labor went into it, and that labor is allowed … Continue reading

But animation is great because of one thing, and it’s a thing the film grasps hard enough to draw blood: *you can create anything*. The film is tailor-made to exploit this idea: a newlywed man named Grant is zapped by a radio signal and gains the power to control reality, which has terrible consequences for those around him—particularly his new wife, Keri. Grant’s new “superpower” (I guess) is that all his intrusive thoughts manifest as literal reality. The human brain is an association machine, a demon monkey flinging shit at the wall, and we’ve all had our moments of “thank *fuck* nobody can see the thought I just had.”

Grant has no fucks to thank. Whenever he imagines something—no matter how obscene or bizarre—it just *exists* out in the open. His wife comments that he has “bedroom eyes”, and his face literally transforms into a bedroom (it makes sense in context…kinda). Her breasts remind him of balloons, so he literally can twist them into balloon animals. Throw in some cute songs c/o longtime collaborator Maureen McElheron, and a recurrent steel guitar jag, and that’s the movie. Grant’s innermost fantasies just burst out of him all the time like animals escaping a zoo, leading to all sorts of perversely amusing gags and adventures. There’s a stock B-movie plot about a totalitarian corporation seeking to control Grant’s powers (this is pretty ordinary stuff, and not the movie’s strongest point), but the movie really is just joke after joke after joke.

It gallops at breakneck pace, six laps ahead of the viewer. I kept having to pause because it was overstimulating the living crap out of me. The film is a triumph of quantity as well as quality: so relentless in its attack that it wears you down and then wins you over. Every scene is stuffed with throwaway gags, jags, riffs, and surrealist fancies, all working by the principle Tex Avery perfected in the fifties: just machinegun the audience to death with *every joke idea you’ve got*—even if only 50% of your material lands, you’ve turned the viewer into Swiss cheese. And Plympton can afford to be far more transgressive and foul than Termite Terrace was ever allowed to be. Things that are (mostly) implied in Avery’s work just get drawn outright here.

It’s not just a lunchroom food fight. The film *does* have stuff to say, if you’re in the mood to trowel through penises, feces, and viscera. Like Grant himself, it has hidden depths.

Grant is depicted as a boring square. (Almost literally, his silhouette is a rectangle with a head sticking out.) He is an accountant, vilified since the days of Monty Python and Arthur Pewtie as the most criminally boring profession to exist. He delays his uxorious duties because of work. Is the most boring person you know just a lunatic who’s good at hiding?

This seems like commentary on the animation trade itself, and the odd way it juxtaposes dreams with drudgery. Bill Plympton’s mind is buzzing with some of the wildest and weirdest thoughts ever thunk…but his body is sitting at a desk, pushing a pencil. He’d look like the world’s most boring man if you couldn’t see what he was drawing. The dichotomy of “boring life, wild art” is on full display here, both textually and subtextually. Grant prefers stability and order, but probably for the same reason a lunatic asylum does: because its fundamental nature is chaos. It’s disturbing to Grant (and even to us—*I Married A Strange Person!* could have easily been a horror film) that his life and marriage are being wrecked, not by the dreams of a mad god bent on tormenting him, but by himself. The call is coming from inside the house!

The film’s core is the relationship between Grant and Keri, which is both a self-aware sitcom cliche (complete with meddling in-laws) and unlike any marriage I have seen in any film. Throughout, Keri ponders what to make of her husband. While he’s in the hell of being unable to hide himself, Keri is in hell of not knowing who he is. She has married a ghost. A mirage. A shape. Who is this man—simultanouely deathly-dull and a wrecker of worlds?

*I Married A Strange Etc* can be clunky when it attempts political satire, but its commentary on married life feels dead on. We’re all strange people. How do we deal with it? By becoming hidden people. We pretend the suit’s our skin and the mask’s our face. But we can’t hide forever. At a certain point, we have to let the disguise drop, and reveal who we truly are. Or be revealed. That’s the thing: eventually your secrets always come tumbling out.

Put more grotesquely, if you’re a guy who’s into feet, your wife is gonna figure that out real soon. There’s an awkward conversation to have or not have, but either way, she will eventually know. You cannot spend ten-plus hours a day around a person without having some cracks appear in whatever social facade exists around you.

The movie’s gross-out gags provoke comparisons with another (more troubling) titan of 90s animation. I grew up on Ren and Stimpy. It briefly dominated my inner sky like Sirius. After the corporate toy-commercial deadness of 80s cartoons, it seemed real and electric and alive. Inside the show was the spirit of Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Frank Tashlin, still alive and (if anything) twisted to be *even more* freakish. I was in love. John Kricfalusi seemed like animation’s own Martin Luther King; his show a burning fire to consume the papist heresies of the 80s.

But when I watched Kricfalusi’s ill-fated 2004 reboot of the show (*Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”* or whatever), I was struck by how *miserable* it felt. Had Kricfalusi artistically fallen apart? Had this nihilism always been there, and was I just now watching with eyes open wide? I don’t know, but it was like I was seeing right through the show and into the bleak, cragged mind of its creator: a man who hates women, hates his parents, hates 95% of classic animation (and all of modern animation), hates his audiences, and fundamentally does not have much to say, except to stew and sulk on his resentments endlessly. His animation was still technically brilliant, but what was he *doing* with his talent? Did I really want to watch old wounds getting picked open forever in a technically magisterial fashion? A massive bomb, *Adult Party Cartoon* was cancelled after six episodes. Even if it hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching the seventh. I was done. Before the “Cans Without Labels” Kickstarter debacle, before unfortunate discoveries re: his personal life, my verdict on John Kricfalusi’s deal was a big fat “thanks, I got it.”

By contrast, there’s a joyous, generous warmth to I Married A Strange Person that I found appealing and even emotionally moving. It welcomes the viewer in, instead of freezing them out. It doesn’t sneer; it smiles. It’s not cynical or mean. It’s anything but nihilistic. I guess there’s *some* piss and spite (we get the Tex Avery end of Warner Bros more than, say, Chuck Jones). The riffs about an unfunny and sexually inadequate comedian feel aimed at someone Plympton knows. The nefarious Smile Corporation can only be Disney. Walt would have loved to have an armored tank division, even if they did occasionally hump each other like heat-ridden dogs.

It might also be a story about masculinity. What is a man? What is the role of a man? An oft-mocked . These are your two choices, you’re a Man Who’s Bad to Women, or a Man Who’s Not Bad to Women. But “not a jerk to women” isn’t an identity any more than “not mushrooms” is a pizza topping. What actually are you?

I think the default male experience is one of *freakiness*. The sort of freakiness that leaves you isolated and lonely: you have things that are integral to your psyche yet cannot ever be seen by those around you.

It’s generally true that men are a sex of outliers and extremes. Scholastically, boys seem more variable than women, producing more high and low achievers, and this tendency toward extremity seems to carry itself into art as well. *I Married A Strange Person* was made by a man, not a woman. (There are stories we might tell to explain male misfits: from evolution’s perspective, it’s simply not as large a crisis for a man to die or fail to reproduce. Male gametes are small, numerous, and disposable.)

Yes, women can be strange and perverse. But I still remember the Reddit post titled “How can I get my boyfriend to stop digging his tunnel?” To be clear, this was not a metaphorical tunnel. A woman was idly wondering why her boyfriend was suddenly spending all his time digging an enormous hole. Even if all gendered identifiers had been stripped from the post, you still would confidently predict that the hole digger would be a man. “Digging a hole in your yard for no reason” is just a particular kind of madness that only men seem to have. And I wonder if her boyfriend, when he speaks to others, mentions that he’s digging a hole? He’d probably love to talk about it. But he’s also aware—afraid—that whoever he tells about it wouldn’t share his love.

The curse of being a woman is that you are constantly being perceived, constantly on display. The curse of being a man is that nobody wants to know who you actually are. The average woman, viewing her boyfriend’s internet search history, would react with disgust. *Ew. Ick.*

Being a man means hiding your true self from women, and wondering how much you can safely show her. It’s a troubling spot to be in. Maybe she fell in love with your mask, which is rotting to pieces on your face, an illusion more unsustainable by the day. Or maybe she *knows* you’re a freak. Maybe she knew all along, and is hoping you’ll whisk her off on all sorts of bizarre adventures. That’s what you hope for, anyway. My own mother and father had the same kind of relationship as Grant and Keri in the film, now that I think of it.

*I Married a Strange Person!* is an amazing achievement. A bath of idiocy and filth that leaves you feeling strangely wise and clean. I expect that no movie like it will be made again in my lifetime.

“My baby’s in there someplace,” – David Bowie, “TVC 15”

You’d better like 1977’s rock opus Bat Out of Hell. You were conceived to it. I am not speaking hypothetically. You were actually conceived while it was playing. I know this as a fact. I was there. I was watching.

“Are we doing an ‘I fucked your mom thing’ here?” Sadly, no. I did not participate in your conception. I was wearing my Roscoe the Rat costume at the time, and Mr Jenkins (my shift manager) would yell at me if I even unbuttoned the bum flap without notarized consent, so I was forced to remain an observer. I remember finding it odd that two people were screwing in the drive-thru of Roscoe the Rat’s Squeak-tastic Burger Barn, but was glad to finally see the miracle of life occur. Anyway.

This album had a lot working against it. An album of eight minute Wagnerian piano ballads, starring a chubby farmboy from Texas, released in the face of two adversarial headwinds—disco in the US, punk in the UK—yeah, good luck with that. To a risk-averse music industry, this album must have seemed like a scientific experiment in how to sell zero copies. It eventually sold forty-four million. Which is nearly the same as zero, when you think about it (I didn’t).

But songwriter Jim Steinman believed in being out of step with the times, believed in being unfashionable on purpose. It usually doesn’t work, but sometimes it’s the only thing that can. It’s never easy, though. Meat Loaf and Steinman had to tour the record relentlessly, finally breaking the beast in Canada (where it’s currently 2x Platinum). Canadians are right to love Meat Loaf, just as they’re right to love Fleetwood Mac (Rumors is also 2x Platinum). Let’s do Canadians a favor and stop examining their cultural tastes while they’re ahead.

But success came at a price. Meat Loaf’s brutal road schedule did not allow off-days so his voice could recover, which meant it it didn’t. Meat Loaf tore his amazing voice to shreds performing these songs live, five days a week. His next album (1981’s Dead Ringer) finds him a haggard shell of his former self. It’s a dispiriting listen. He died so that Bat Out of Hell could live. There are several Michael Lee Aday albums. But in a sense, this is the one and only record ever made by Meat Loaf. Bat Out of Hell is glorious: a work I truly love. But it’s tragic, as well as magic.

(The above is Steinman’s own account of what went wrong with Meat Loaf’s voice. A perusal of Setlist.fm suggests a far more relaxed schedule than he lets on, with countless multi-day breaks between shows. But maybe there are dates missing, so take that for what it’s worth. Which is also how you should take Meat Loaf’s own claim that his voice loss was mainly “psychosomatic”.)

And the album’s very magic. Enchantment leaps off the speakers, out of the cover, and out of nearly every other element of its conception. Few albums are so uniformly great in every aspect. It has wonderful singing, great production and engineering, and beyond superlative songwriting.

Two of the three greatest compositions Jim Steinman ever wrote in his life are on here (the third being “Faster than the Speed of Night” by Bonnie Tyler).

The first highlight is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, a great and hammy piece of Springsteen-style storytelling, packed with cool moments and inspired ideas. And it’s funny, too—overflowing with tonal influences from Steinman and Ellen Foley’s work with National Lampoon. My only complaint is that the “will you love me?” part goes for a long time, and finally exhausts the listener the way it exhausts the protagonist. (Apparently Steinman’s original version was twenty minutes long, and had him doing the Phil Rizzuto baseball bit himself.)

But the masterpiece—of the album, and of several of the creators’ careers—is closing opus “For Crying Out Loud”. A lesson in how to take an unsuspecting piano and pound it until the stars fall. The middle section breaks, strings crash, and then total cataclysm occurs. Atoms split, everything’s louder than everything else. It’s an astonishing album closer. An off-ramp that sends you flying into space.

Everything else here is great too. The opening track is a powerful scorching barn-burner, grasping and ambitious and realizing those ambitions. “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” finds Steinman in standard power balladeer mode—a cloak he obviously wears quite well. Even the shorter album tracks rule all over the place. “All Revved Up And No Place To Go” is more great Springsteen-type stuff. I love the double-time groove at the end. It sounds so fiery and kickass and cool.

Most of the album is very dramatic. Perhaps excessively so, to some tastes. I guess maybe it verges slightly on the wrong side of theater-kid precious, but I don’t really mind it. And there are plenty of moments where it’s absolutely not taking itself seriously, to offset the sturm-und-drang. Todd Rundgren offers quite a lot of ironic detachment—the opening riff in “Paradise” sounds like a mega-cliche’d blues riff that you’d play when you’re taking the piss. There’s an element of persiflage to what Bat Out of Hell is doing. Of trying to make the audience smile while not totally undermining the project. It does the hardest thing: satirizes itself while also taking itself seriously. No matter what level you approach this CD on, it meets you there.

None of the other Meat Loaf albums equal this.

His big comeback, Bat out of Hell 2 does offer strangely exact parallels in a lot of ways. (And not just because it had a song that, like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”, your buddy from school would swear up and down was secretly about anal sex, harr harr.) Again, Meat Loaf released it in the worst of possible years—by 1993, grunge rock had just broken in the states, and R’n’B had a commercial stranglehold that I viscerally remember. And suddenly, you had this disc of massive operatic cheeseburgers that sold a million million copies. Another inspiring win for the little guy. Or the big guy, I guess.

But sometimes the parallels go awry. The singing is not as strong. And where Todd Rundgren’s production of Bat out of Hell is timeless, Bat Out of Hell 2‘s production now feels (while not bad) fairly typical of its era. It’s essentially 1993, The Album, with that “early-gen CD sound”—a bit harsh, a bit too informed by the ultra-processed sound of glam metal. There are some modernistic touches that don’t quite gel with the Broadway-meets-Peter Pan grandeur being attempted.

Bat Out of Hell 3 is not something I care to discuss at length. I mean, Wikipedia says that “[Desmond] Child [who produced] began recording sessions by playing Slipknot CDs to get the assembled musicians in the mood.” That’s a better summation of the album’s issues than I could ever write.

It contains a grab bag of mostly old (and mostly second-tier) Jim Steinman compositions (who was sadly in fading health at the time), fluffed out with whatever Songwriters’R’Us guys Meat Loaf could find (Rob Zombie’s John 5, Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx). It’s long, exhausting, tonally confused, and unnecessary. It does not earn its name. To its credit, few albums do. The first Bat out of Hell extends out of rock entirely, and is arguably bigger than music itself.

Like all of Jim Steinman’s work, Bat Out of Hell owes no allegiance to any form of media. It’s a rock album, but even that ultimately seems almost accidental. It could have just as easily been a play (it started out that way), or a film, or a book, or a tube of wart-removal cream. The fact that Bat out of Hell is the particular thing it is seems like a twist of fate. Steinman’s patented technique of making things bigger than big and more colorful than color works on any canvas. Maybe not the wart-removal cream canvas. He’s compared to Springsteen more than enough (in this review, too), but there’s a bit of Bowie in him. Bowie was essentially a light entertainer who used rock—like a latter day French chanson singer. I like that. Use art in whatever way you can. Don’t be its slave.

In Remina* (地獄星レミナ) Junji Ito tells a tale as old as time: girl is born; girl is named after newly-discovered star; star turns out to be malevolent planet-sized Lovecraftian entity en-route to destroy the Earth with its tongue (like we’re a Tootsie Pop and it’s finding out how many licks it takes to get to the planet core); girl spends most of the tankōbon running from deranged religious fanatics convinced she intentionally lured the planet here to lick us to death…it’s a well-worn formula, but sometimes it’s nice to relax with the classics.

I reviewed a bootleg translation of Jigokusei Remina 12 years ago. There’s now an official English release from Viz Media, and so I will review it a second time.

My review: It’s worse than I recall it being: the end.

If I gave comics a letter grade, Remina would probably get a C minus. That’s right, Mr Ito. Not even a C! A C minus! Man, I hope he learns English, and reads this review. I bet it would break him. A single tear would slide down his crestfallen face.

Even at the height of my Junji Ito fanboy phase, I was mixed on Remina (or Hellstar Remina, which is what the scanlations^[1]A “scanlation” is an unofficial fan-made translations of a Japanese-language manga. As with most of Junji Ito’s work, Remina‘s path into the English language was fraught with … Continue reading called it). Following on the heels of the fish-out-of-water classic Gyo, and serialized in six chapters from 2004-2005 in Japan’s Biggu Komikku Supirittsu, It was always one of those “good enough that it really should be better” mangas: astonishingly competent in parts, yet collectively a failure.

Ito-san’s viscid, squamous, cell-like art remains fucking incredible and a Cheech-and-Chong-atop-Mt-Kilimanjaro high point for the manga. Lines of black corrugate the page, like Stachybotrys mould infesting your shower and perhaps your lungs. Like most of Ito’s best work, it has a biophilic quality: the art doesn’t seem to have been drawn so much as cultivated in a Petri dish. Hopefully one that got a thorough cleaning afterward.

The editing and pacing of the panels is highly kinetic, giving the work a cinematic quality that pairs well with the loony sci-fi horror plot. Remina is packed with showstopper double-pagers, all placed with a sharp sense of drive and rhythm, going slam against your visual cortex just when the story needs a huge and thrilling needle-drop moment. We get a sense of scale when we see the hugeness of the eye staring out of Remina’s red bulk, a vivid claustrophobia in the shots of humans exploring the planet’s surface. Breathlessly paced, piling spectacle on spectacle, Remina is adrenaline printed on paper and demands to be binged in one go. It remains impressive to me that Junji puts out such complex, integrated art on a monthly schedule (or once did), with such a strong command of things like layout and pacing.

But as a story, Remina was and remains a frustrating read: a litany of opportunities missed and squandered. As an artist, he’s a master. As a writer, he frequently has no idea what he’s doing, and here he hacks off his own story’s legs at almost every turn. Many things about Remina could have worked, in theory. But they’re undermined by something else Ito tries to do.

For example:

• It’s the end of the world…but it’s a world full of insane psychopathic morons, who torture an innocent teenage girl because she has the wrong name, so who cares? Good riddance to bad rubbish.
• Remina (the girl, not the planet) is the innocent victim of a witch-hunt, and we should be on her side…but she’d need to be a character and not just a blank doll who exists to be whipped and beaten, one with no agency, or desires, or anything of her own. Bad things happen to her, and we don’t feel anything.
• *Remina* sees Ito boldly striding from his safety zone, unleashing a radically imaginative…(checks notes)…reprise of standard 1950s sci fi tropes, I guess.

Remina wears its influences on its sleeve. It has the go for broke and then when you’re broke grab your girlfriend’s credit card and make her broke too energy that the better Ray Harryhausen monster flicks evoke, but with the benefit that Ito can draw anything he wants, and isn’t confined by budgetary limitations. Old B movies hang over Remina the way the planet itself does to the characters in the story.

It’s certainly an able recapturing of the Ed Wood spaceship-is-clearly-a-model-dangled-from-a-wire era of science fiction. (We’ll be generous, and shelve discussion of whether that’s something that should be recaptured.) If that’s what you want, you’re eating. And obviously, there’s ample precedent for gonzo “you won’t BELIEVE the size of this thing that’s destroying our city!” storytelling within Japanese media itself—ゴジラ being the central example. Notably, Godzilla is classically portrayed as a saurian monster. Remina has a reptilian aspect too, particularly its forked tongue, and vertically-slitted eye. (The horrific planet overwhelmingly looks human, though, which makes thematic if not logical sense.)

But the story’s most direct evolutionary ancestors are Sakyo Komatsu’s 1973 novel Japan Sinks (where an implausible scenario is described in the terse language of a governmental disaster report) and Kazuo Uemetsu’s Fourteen (a bewildering apocalypse manga where the world seemingly ends in every way imaginable at once). Junji Ito has spoken of highly of Komatsu and Uemetsu as artistic influences, so that’s one possible Rosetta Stone for Remina: a homage to the stories that shaped him.

But Ito’s storytelling is too loose and too “monthly manga” to nail the hard sci fi tone of Komatsu. Everything about Remina’s setting is just an incoherent mess that survives zero logic and exists largely just to set up the next showstopper visual piece. Remina isn’t hard sci fi. It’s so soft it achieves negative digits on the Mohs Scale. This is one of those stories where astrophysicists explain the speed of light to each other.

And although Kazuo Uemetsu (who sadly passed away in 2024) remains Junji Ito’s favorite mangaka (and is praised in every interview the man gives), I have never detected much of the “Umezz” style in Ito’s work. At its best, Fourteen is just a firehose of unchained ideas, disgorged stream-of-consciousness style at your retinas. It was exhausting, and I do not plan on re-reading it any time soon, but it left the same impression on my consciousness that a severe fever might. I was changed by it. Remina is far less fun and spontaneous. It feels planned, calculated. But if that’s so, why plan this?

I think Remina needed to be eerie and dreamy and surreal, not literal and logical. It needed to show us a bizarre, impossible doom overtaking the world without explaining that doom to death at every turn.

Remina offers no ambiguity. On every other page (particularly in the first two volumes), we get Exposition Scientist characters offering verbose narration on what’s happening with the planet (always with camera angles helpfully showing the planet’s approach), ensuring that we see the entire plot in 4K hi-def. And believe me when I say that Remina‘s plot does not stand up to close scrutiny.

If you want to make a scary horror comic about a planet that may be alive, we don’t need to see the planet disgorging a cartoon tongue. You’re rubbing our faces in the story’s weakest aspect: the scientifically implausible setting and story. I wish Ito had focused more on tone and mood, instead of a regime of visual literalness. Perhaps he should have confined us to one character’s viewpoint: someone on the ground, maybe. I know I’m “punching up” Ito’s work to an annoying degree, but if this manga’s events happened to you in real life, you’d probably have no idea what was going on. You’d understand the unfolding disaster as a series of ruptures in your daily life. Strange piercing noises from out of space. An unendurable jangling in your teeth fillings. Vast and horrific shadows drifting monstrously across the voided face of the clouds. The internet would either crash or be packed with contradictory nonsense: a screaming madhouse, its inevitable silencing a mercy-killing. If you had a radio, it would blast out a blizzard of static until you shut it off to save your remaining marbles. You would not know what to trust or to believe. Certainly, you would not trust your own eyes.

That’s the tone Remina left me hungry for. One of uncertainty, with mankind crossing the L1 Lagrange point of something truly inexplicable. The best part of the comic might be the scene (brief but compelling) where astronauts land on the planet, and literally cannot comprehend what’s happening there. They think they see people there…people waving.

But this is seldom the tone Remina goes for. Instead, it shows what should remain hidden.

Stephen King wrote something perceptive about the flaws of visual mediums such as films. Their strength—their ability to connect directly with the reader’s senses—inevitably becomes a weakness, as the audience will start focusing on technical flaws, and trying to pull apart the effect (which we know ultimately comes from a puppetmaker’s workshop or a CGI rendering farm ). As he put it (On Writing)…

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much . . . including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster’s back.

Yep, that’s Remina. 261 tankobon-format pages, slowly zooming in on the monster’s zipper.

In 1980 Stephen King wrote a novella called The Mist (first published in the Dark Forces anthology and later reprinted in his own 1985 Skeleton Crew collection).

Thematically, it runs a similar line to Remina. The outer narrative is that a government experiment went horribly wrong and plunged Anytown USA into a liminal half-world shrouded in mist. The mist is the important thing, as it prevents the characters from establishing a rapprochement with their new environment. King recognized that monsters you see aren’t half as scary as monsters shrouded in fog—visible as a limb, a tail, a tongue.

Occasionally (more frequently as the denouement looms), characters in*The Mist glimpse some of the full and horrible extent of the changes that have swept over their world. But they never see the full picture, and what they do see is blurry. This makes parts of The Mist horrifying in a grounded, believable way that Remina never approaches in its blitzkrieg attack on your limbic system. His description of a colossal creature, taking unbelievably large strides through the mist—is one of the most memorable setpieces in a Stephen King story. You feel the ground shake when that thing’s six impossible feet land around the characters.

At about twenty past one—I was beginning to feel hungry—Billy clutched my arm. “Daddy, what’s that? What’s that!”

A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us. I jammed on the brakes. Amanda, who had been catnapping, was thrown forward.

Something came; again, that is all I can say for sure. It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots on Mrs. Carmody’s hands. Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight. For the moment it was over the Scout I had an impression of something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout—in other words, something so big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a seismological series of thuds back.

Did “the mist only allow them to glimpse things briefly”? Well, no. The writer (playing God unseen) did that, because he judged it would be more effective if the story was told this way. He was right.

By contrast, Ito’s world shows too much, and becomes weightless and cartoony and unreal, despite the masterful art. “Mehr licht!”, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have cried on his deathbed. “More light!” Remina needed weniger licht—less light.

Ito makes his ramshackle sci-fi setting support social commentary about fame and celebrity. This is a dubious idea on the face of things, but the commentary only hits shallow obvious points anyway. Did you know there’s a dark side to fame? That your fans might turn on you at any moment? There’s a twist at the end involving the president of Remina’s fan club, a twist both unlikely and on-the-nose.

The protracted horrors of the book’s middle section feel gratuitous and lazily cynical, much as some of Alan Moore’s work does (in my view). It feels truly implausible that so many people would be out to get Remina, just because of her name. Ito’s satiric barbs fail to stick in the skin because this is not what people do. Six years after Ito released this comic, the Great East Japan Earthquake flung forty-meter tsunamis against Japan’s Iwate Prefecture. Twenty thousand people died. The reaction was not anarchy and mobocracy (and the killing of random young women who shared nominative determinism with the tsunami), but an reasonably orderly and effective response. This seems to be the norm when disaster strikes—our culture’s “humans are fundamentally evil” narratives are mostly founded on things like Kitty Genovese—hoary nuggets of “everyone knows” pop culture wisdom that have grown much, much bigger in the telling than they were in reality. Things like PizzaGate are small, ineffective, and usually seem more like social clubs for crazy people (who tend to alienate their real life friends and family) than effective movements.

Ito may have intended a feminist reading of Remina: the central character has not done anything to deserve a hate mob, except have a certain name (a name and role assigned by the ur-patriachal figure of her father). But again, she’s such a nonentity, such a generic made-to-order victim, that it’s impossible to feel anything for her. Toward the end, I started to sympathize with the mob a bit. Yeah, no shit they care about Remina’s name. It’s the only noteworthy thing about her!

Ito has never been one to overload his female leads with character development (his famous anti-heroine Tomie is defined by a lack of a character—in the earliest story she’s clearly an innocent victim of male obsession, in later stories she’s more of an evil succubus figure, in Tomie Returns she’s a “monster of the week” with powers that seemingly change with the story Ito wishes to tell). But on my first read, I wondered if Remina’s blankness might be intentional—Ito setting us up for a twist ending, where she turns to face the other characters, and her human face is gone. Swallowed. Replaced with the horrific cloud-chained visage of the planet Remina, and only the planet Remina. Because the hate mob was right. This blank of a girl was the the living avatar of the hell planet.

Remina is worth getting to complete your (legal) Junji Ito collection. Fast-paced and forgettable, it does not display Ito at his best.

The most enjoyable parts were (again) the pair of scenes where characters explore the surface of Remina. These work great as self-contained horror pieces, and they’re certainly disgusting and gruesome. They also do not feature the girl Remina at all. That could be a clue as to what doesn’t work about this volume.

Viz’s edition lacks my favorite part of the original Japanese release—the concluding standalone short-story 億万ぼっち, or Okuman botchi. The title has been translated various ways. Army of One. Lonely Billionaire. Billion Lonesomes.

The story itself is fantastic: an inspired horror riff on the way antisocial loners view interaction: as bodies being stitched together; in horrific forced intimacy.

It’s clever, surprisingly subtle for such gruesome material, with actual intelligent things to say about social isolation and loneliness in the age of mass media. (I could have done without the final panel.) It connects back in time to the Japanese “Hikikomori” phenomenon (it could also be read in light of Volker Grassmuck’s classic “I’m Alone but Not Lonely” essay, which details otaku culture specifically), and forward to things like involuntary celibates,

Army of One‘s ending, like Remina’s, makes no sense when read literally, but unlike Remina’s, it works well metaphorically. When I read some incel theorypoasting about how Staceys don’t want good kind lads (like him), I can’t escape the knowledge that he has never experienced the thing he claims to desire. He’s attracted to the idea of having a girlfriend. Suppose a girl actually asked him on a date…how would he find the experience? Would he enjoy it? Or would it make him shudder—yet more flesh stitched into flesh? Be wary of climbing unknown mountains. There might not be breathable air at the top.

As I’ve said, this story is not present in Viz’s Remina. Maybe because already collected in the earlier Venus in the Blind Spot. Maybe, too, because it upstages the main event.