Horrific Imagery: Junji Ito and The Human Centipede

If you haven’t been under a rock lately, you may have heard about a terrible movie called The Human Centipede. The reason I bring this up on a (mostly) manga blog is that while I was initially interested in the film after only seeing the trailer, the horror of what exactly is happening to the victims therein sank in, and its focus on the way the “centipede” is connected ruined it.

Consider Junji Ito’s Gyo. The man can stick tubes in every orifice of a bloated, gaseous corpse, pop it on top of a pair of creepy mechanical spider legs and run it all over Japan and I’m disgusted, disturbed and unable to put it down. I’m disgusted and disturbed by the very idea of Human Centipede and have no desire to even be in the same theatre as it. Why?

The End of YenPlus

Today I was planning on writing one of my usual posts – a veritable whingefest about a manga that I had very high hopes for that fell magnificently flat – but got sidetracked by an announcement on the YenPlus website: The July 2010 issue will be the last print issue of YenPlus.

As a subscriber from the fifth issue and a reader since issue one, I feel like a broken record even writing this post since a similar one was posted not even a year ago. I truly loved and enjoyed YenPlus even more than Shojo Beat because it had a wider variety of manga styles and included manwha and OEL series as well. The thought that I won’t be able to idly flip through the latest Soul Eater episode while eating dinner is, well, heartwrenching.

Snacking the Japanese Way

Snacks in Japan are serious business. Every month hundreds of new “limited edition” snacks are on the market, some of them variations on old favorites such as Pocky and some of them are new offerings altogether. These snacks are only on the market for a few months or even a few weeks, so there are actually entire magazines devoted to alerting snack maniacs to the latest trends before they’re gone. Shiso Pepsi (along with previous years’ Ice Cucumber Pepsi) is a limited edition summer flavor, destined to be replaced in the fall with something new.

Shojo Beat Petition

I usually don’t get into signing online petitions, but as I’m sure you could guess from my post earlier this week this is a topic that is pretty important to me. The same friend on Twitter who alerted me to the dropping of Shojo Beat posted this link to a petition to bring back Shojo Beat. My comment (which was restricted to 500 characters, which was probably a good thing) follows.

The End of Shojo Beat

I’m not sure how I missed this bit of information, but a friend on Twitter mentioned it today and I had to make sure it was true before I let it sink in too much. The official word from Viz is that the July 2009 issue of Shojo Beat is to be the last.