THE DARK DRINKS BLOOD, by Junji Ito (Voices in the Dark ch1)

Happy Halloween! Here’s a new Junji Ito translation project.

Voices in the Dark is a collection of horror shorts from Junji Ito, published in 2003. The stories themselves were previously published in bimonthly serials in magazines from Asahi Sonorama.

What sets these apart from the other translated Ito shorts you can find online is their length. This first story, “The Dark Drinks Blood”, weighs in at 40 pages. OK it’s also the longest, but there are none under 20 pages. Seven stories make up the volume, and let’s see if I can do ‘em all.

I don’t expect this to make a huge splash since it’s been translated into English by other groups, but it’s been a year since any updates from either of them. I’m throwing my hat in the ring to do the whole volume, and for continuity’s sake, I wanted to do the first story too.

OK!

Heroes of the H-Mansion (6 of 10)

A SHIT TO REMEMBER by Junji Ito

I never liked puns before I started translating

A four page short, rounding out all the content worth translating in Frankenstein.

This one somehow manages to be even less mature than the last one, but is done in a wistful nostalgic style that I’ve never seen from Ito. It’s probably parodying something I don’t know about.

Heroes of the H-Mansion (5 of 10)

Heroes of the H-Mansion (4 of 10)

HELL O’ DOLLIES by Junji Ito

A six page little story that was tucked away in the back of the Frankenstein volume.

It’s cheap and pretty fucking disgusting, and doesn’t require much explaining beyond that.

Enjoy!

Heroes of the H-Mansion (3 of 10)

Heroes of the H-Mansion (2 of 10)

The cast gets twice as big and 5000x cuter.

Heroes of the H-Mansion (part 1 of 10?)

Basically a whole bunch of Marvel Comics injokes and cute caricatures.

Done by Gurihiru, a Japanese artist team best known for their work on POWER PACK, it’s a very irreverent take on the Marvel Universe, if the characters all lived in the same apartment building.

I’ve translated the title liberally as HEROES OF THE H-MANSION, but as with a lot of things in this project, I’ve taken a lot more liberties than I deserve. If there’s any real groaners in here, I may well have put them in overzealously.

West Village Mysteries – MURDER ON THIRD STREET (Unsolved)

MURDER ON THIRD STREET

Story Kyotaro Nishimura
Picture Unknown

Yokogawa recently made inspector. And lately, that involved nothing but pulling a photo from his coat pocket and saying –

“Have you seen this woman?”