Junji Itou

Introduction: Junji Itou is a Japanese writer, penciller, inker and mangaka, who is best known for his horror manga. Some of his notable works include The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Tomie, Uzumaki, and Gyo.

He was inspired from a young age by both his older sisters' drawings and the work of Kazuo Umezu. Itou first began writing and drawing manga as a hobby while working as a dental technician in the early 1990s. In 1987, he submitted a short story to Gekkan Halloween that won an honorable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize (with Umezu himself as one of the judges). This story was later serialized as Tomie.

In addition to Kazuo Umezu, Itou has cited Hideshi Hino, Shinichi Koga, Yasutaka Tsutsui and H.P. Lovecraft as being major influences to his work. The universe Itou depicts is cruel and capricious, his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason, or they are punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. Some of the recurring themes of Itou's work include body horror, seemingly ordinary characters who begin to act out of irrational compulsion, the breakdown of society, deep-sea organisms, and the inevitability of one's demise.

Film director Guillermo del Toro cited on his official Twitter account that Itou was originally a collaborator for the video game Silent Hills, of which both Del Toro and game designer Hideo Kojima were the main directors, however, a year after its announcement the project was canceled by Konami, the IP's owner. Itou and Del Toro would later lend their likenesses towards Kojima's next project, Death Stranding.

In 2006, Junji married Ishiguro Ayako, who is a picture book artist. As of 2013, they have two children. In 2019, Itou received an Eisner Award for his manga adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.