I love Japanese manga creator Junjo Ito, particularly his longer graphic novel work like UZUMAKI, and I was thrilled to receive a surprise gift from my partner Chris Marrs this Christmas: REMINA, hot off the press. Like his other work, it’s wonderfully weird, dark, bleak, Lovecraftian, and beautiful.
The story focuses on Remina, whose father detected a mysterious planet that has emerged from a wormhole he discovered. He names the planet Remina after his beautiful daughter, who becomes a pop star in the tide of fame.
Alarmingly, however, the planet appears to be sucking everything around it into itself, and it’s now coming toward Earth.
I won’t say more about the plot, as you should check it out for yourself, but I really enjoyed this manga. There isn’t a lot of depth in terms of character, with the story being driven by its fantastical plot elements rendered in Ito’s distinctive creepy artistic style. What Ito delivers is pure spectacle, a great creep factor, and a bleak feeling that leads you to conclude character change and development kind of don’t matter when people are confronted with horrors too vast for human influence or meaning.
Overall, I loved it, and it proved horror does indeed make a great gift!
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