Horror icon Junji Ito's latest collection, Statues, is a nasty good time

There’s a sense of mass hysteria at play, as characters go along with unhinged group decisions due to some combination of peer pressure and groupthink. In another standout, “The Bridge,” a community performs an ill-conceived burial ritual that condemns an unlucky few, something that weighs on a lone survivor. In the Ray Bradbury-inspired “The Circus Has Come To Town,” a crowd sits idly by while a homicidal circus goes off the rails. There are literal monsters in these stories, but it’s the human characters who often bring about the greatest misfortunes—this is a bit of a break from the more random, impersonal cosmic horror found in a lot of Ito’s other work.

Even with this focus on human flaws, Ito thankfully doesn’t ignore his love of bizarro nonsense. These stories almost always have a surreal element, with setups like a town where no one has a sense of direction, or a “romance” where the mythical red threads of fate (which bind lovers in Chinese and East Asian mythology) become literal, combining to deliver weird what ifs that feel pulled from a foggy bad dream. While he doesn’t deliver quite as much of his signature body horror as usual, when it does appear, the images stick. Ghosts and ghouls pop from the page in detailed close-ups of decaying faces; we’ve all seen zombies a billion times, but Ito’s spin on the undead is dramatically more demented and unique, elevated by a scratchy style that contrasts with his otherwise smooth and uniform character designs. These unpleasant sights almost always come after a slow build-up, popping out as you turn the page.

Ito’s unsettling designs are his calling card, and for good reason, but there’s a core contradiction that makes him really stand out as an artist: At times, he can be something of a comedian. These scary situations can be so heightened that they swing from unsettling to hilarious, like when a jilted lover tries to embrace his ex while transforming into a weird thread monster, or when a pair of haters hate each other so hard that their beef transcends the grave. The contrast is part of what makes Ito’s work so charming and iconic, and why panels like “This is my hole! It was made for me!” have been spoofed into oblivion. Horror and comedy are odd siblings, but they tend to build in the same way, and at its best, this collection taps into that unlikely overlap.

If there’s a common factor across the stories that don’t come together, it’s that they lack punchlines, darkly humorous or otherwise. “The Doll,” which is about a hypnotist whose persuasion goes well beyond what he intended, comes to a meandering end after failing to deliver a page-turn scare. “Statues,” which the collection is named after, has a similar problem. It’s about art’s curious power to take on a life of its own, and it mixes familiar fears, like being stuck in an old, run-down building with a slasher villain, alongside a way less traditional turn that lets Ito draw the kind of disturbing, slack-jawed corpses he excels at. But it just ends as if it ran out of space in whatever magazine it was originally published.

Statues may not reach the level of Ito’s best work, but this horror maestro has such a unique touch that you’d have a hard time finding something like it outside his catalog. Whether it’s the contrast between pure white backgrounds and frantically cross-hatched terrors, or the way he leans into unusual concepts that seem lifted from a dim childhood trauma, this collection embodies how singular Ito’s work can be.