I walked from Ultraman Shopping Street north for about a half hour toward the nearby ward (or suburb) of Setagawa. My goal was a gallery to see a very special art exhibit, and I knew I was on the right track when signs began to appear on community notice boards:
By sheer providence I had seen a sign advertising this in a bookstore the other day. Junji Ito is one of my favourite manga creators, and I love his stories and his art, and to be honest he would have been at the top of my list had you asked who I’d like to see an exhibit of, so I was absolutely overjoyed to have a chance. But would it be good?
It was astonishingly good! This was a full blown exhibit of original art spanning his nearly 40-year horror manga career. There were dozens and dozens of pieces on display, photos were allowed, and we could get right up close to the works to admire their detail.
It was arranged chronologically, starting with Tomie and moving into Uzumaki and Gyo and his many short stories since. Almost all the original art – oils or watercolours – for the covers of his works were on display, as well as massive amounts of iconic manga pages.
Yes this is all his original work, not facsimiles or reprints; Hand drawn by him using inks and screen tone. Many are larger than the size they were printed, and it was fascinating to see how he created his work in detail.
Take the above for instance: the white lines on the top panel are actually painted on to a black background. And you can see white paint was used for the sound effects, which suggests they were added afterwards, over the art. Every black line is hand-inked, and the lightning appears to have been scratched (?) out of the tone used for the sky. In his comments that accompanied several of his example pieces, he mentions he doubts he could produce such detailed work today (he’s 60 now).
Much of the art was presented framed, but the gallery space itself was also wonderful designed and decorated to fit his work.
That’s the Uzumaki room, which contains many panels from the manga, as well as colour art for the covers and even early designs for characters or covers
As technology changed, so too did manga production, and most of it is digital now. Apparently Ito still works with traditional media (they had photos of his studio which didn’t look like it has changed much since the 1980s) and assistants touch up his line art digitally. Here’s a comparison from Hellstar Remina showing his original at bottom and after the tone is added digitally on top:
Those pages were very large, about newspaper sized each.
The exhibition included a lot of original oil or watercolour art pieces not created for particular manga stories, and the above one (look closely in the background) had a comment from Ito that when this was listed in a gallery years ago it didn’t sell but he thinks if he listed it again it would 🙂
For many years he was well known in Japan but a cult creator overseas. In the last five or so years his fame has exploded and he is now extremely successful worldwide. One room of the exhibit contained a dizzying selection of his publications in many different languages, and it was mentioned he’s been selling about half a million copies a year in the USA for several years now.
One room contained work he created as a child or while in high school! This was also the room that featured his famous cat manga (which he wrote about his experiences of adopting cats with his wife). The art in those books – which portrays cats in his distinctive style – is wonderful:
There was also this prototype figure made especially for the exhibit:
And this copy of the first manga monthly he ever had a story in:
I hate to reduce this man’s prodigious talent down to something base, but I just kept thinking about the fact that this exhibit of dozens upon dozens of iconic and extremely talented original manga art and paintings must now be worth a fortune. A quick search online shows that small sketches of his have sold for $3000+ in recent years so I can’t imagine what something like this painting could go for:
I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed this exhibit. I have two shelves of his work at home, and have been reading him since long before he became well known in the USA. It was a privilege to be able to see so much of his original work, and to read about their inspirations in his own words.
This was probably the highlight of this entire trip 🙂
