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Horror is a broad category, and no one knows that better than Junji Ito. The iconic horror writer and artist has touched on nearly every subgenre within horror, from classic ghost stories to the horror lurking within the most mundane of items. However, he still feels the draw of cosmic horror and wants to find a way to “push it a little further” if he gets the chance.

In a recent interview, Junji Ito talked about the way he approaches horror. There aren’t many themes or sub-genres that particularly frighten the legendary mangaka, but he’d like another crack at cosmic horror. “In Sensor, I tried to explore a kind of cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian vein,” Ito explained. “But I felt it ended up being somewhat incomplete. If I get the chance, I’d like to revisit the theme of cosmic horror and push it a little further.”

Sensor, which was published in 2018 and 2019, follows a young woman who encounters a village encased in glass that gets wiped out by a cosmic entity from a nearby volcano. It certainly delivers on the unknowable horrors beyond space and time, but, by Ito’s own admission, doesn’t have the same underlying terror that cosmic horror is built upon.

The thing about artists is that they are seldom actually satisfied with what they’ve created, so we’re not surprised that even Junji Ito sees room to grow in his past work. If he ever wants to take another crack at cosmic horror after Sensor, we certainly wouldn’t be upset.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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