昭和ちびっこ怪奇画報

青幻舎ビジュアル文庫

by 初見健一

The occult fad of the 1960s-70s in Japanese comics, magazines, films and popular culture produced countless bizarre tales and creatures. Many of these tropes, from leviathans and zombie hordes to monstrous insects and terrifying ghosts, laid the foundations for themes which carry on to this day, both in Japan and the West. This book offers a huge collection of illustrations by Shigeru Komatsuzaki, Gojin Ishihara, Takashi Minamimura and other master illustrators who appeared in a variety of media. Presented in five categories psychic, unexplored regions, grotesque, cold-blooded and savage, and hysteria and insanity it is a legacy of rich imagination to be enjoyed anew.

256 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2015

Reviews

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection of vintage Japanese horror and genre pop-art from pre-Ring era J-horror. Unfortunately, it's a paperback bunko, which is smaller even than a mass market paperback, and the spine is glued, not sewn, which is a problem considering most of the artwork are two page spreads. You can't even break the spine to get a better look at it, because the printing of the artwork is cut off in the middle. Even though the book is all in Japanese except the title, there are some recognizable themes here: Hoichi the Earless from Kwaidan, Christopher Lee Hammer Dracula movies, Edgar Allan Poe, and Frankenstein's monster. It would be nice to see this published in magazine format with the artwork title captions and brief essays in English to give some more context. Really for diehard genre fans. I'd recommend watching classic Japanese horror from the time period, and reading mangaka like Shigeru Mizuki, Kazuo Umezz, and Yoshiharu Tsuge.