Manga Exhibition Photo Dump (Part 2): Junji Ito

This is Part 2 of a two part post of manga originals. Part 1 is here

I’ve been fortunate enough to recently see two truly spectacular exhibits of original manga pages. Seeing any manga originals is in itself a pretty rare occurrence–for a number of Japan-specific reasons–so it was truly a treat to see so many amazing originals in such a short span of time. 

In this post: the Junji Ito exhibit at Angoulême.

I’ve been wanting to go to the Angoulême festival for ages, and this past year I finally went! There was a real murderer’s row of guests and exhibits this year–the Music & Comics show and the Philippe Druillet installation were personal highlights–but I was most excited about the Junji Ito exhibit. My French wasn’t wholly up to the task of following his talk on Thursday afternoon, but I got the general gist of it. It was a failry by-the-numbers career retrospective interview.

We did, though, shortly thereafter make a beeline for the accompanying exhibit. (Which turned out to be a really good decision, since apparently the exhibit was even more packed Friday – Sunday than it was when we were there… and it was plenty crowded when we were there.)

Anyway, here’s a handful of pics. There were pieces up from pretty much all of Ito’s “greatest hits”–Tomie, Uzumaki, Gyo–as well as work from the recent torrent of collected works. It’s also the only exhibit I’ve been to with a soundtrack: creepy sounds! 

He did the special-for-Angoulême art in the poster above that was available is a really nice print. Here’s one framed (along with my daughter’s cat).

 

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