The Phantom Zone

The Covid-19 pandemic that began at the end of 2019 shook the entire world, and even now, at the beginning of 2021, the situation does not seem to improve. The work on "The Phantom Zone" took place in 2020 -... the height of the epidemic, when I spent most of my time without sticking my nose out of the house.
In this forced confinement, a new collection of stories was born, initially published on the online platform "Line manga".
For me, this was my first experience of publishing online, but I appreciated the significant difference between online platforms and physical magazines, namely - the lack of restrictions on the volume of material. When you publish in a magazine, you don't have the opportunity to go beyond a certain number of pages allotted for each story. This is not so problematic for serial projects, but when it comes to a standalone story, you must fit it into a specified format of 32 pages. For professional mangakas, such restrictions are the norm, but I have always had issues with this, and at the stage of creating drafts, I drew more pages than necessary, which forced me to constantly cut and compress something. And if I didn’t manage to do this, I had to redo the finale. It’s embarrassing to admit, but it was extremely unprofessional on my part.
This time, the restrictions were not so strict. I was allowed to determine the volume of publication myself, so I could draw to my pleasure. However, how well this reflected in my works will be understood only by rereading them after some time. But some things are clear already now: I first noticed the length of the plot when I was drawing the pages of "The Weepers".
Over the years, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw manga - all good ideas have already been used, the new ones seem lightweight, or even downright silly. All that remains is to rummage through the dusty archives in the attic. Thus, this collection is mainly composed of stories based on unused ideas from an old notebook.
The plot of "The Weepers" is woven from the lines of a song in the enka genre and reflections on the so-called "path of tears" - the grooves formed on the cheeks of a woman who has cried for a long time. However, it so happened that I ultimately did not use this expression (by the way, I came across it in the book "The Way of Manga" by Fujii Fujio).
The story "Evil Madonna" owes its title to a silly play on kanji: the word "madonna" can be written as "devilish evil woman" (on the same page of my old notebook was an even less comprehensible word "madan" - "devilish master" - but I no longer remember why I wrote it).
Originally, "Stream of Spirits" was conceived as a story about certain chosen representatives of humanity who, as a result of a sudden leap in evolution, acquired a streamlined form in order to withstand the deadly solar wind or something like that, but this was too reminiscent of adventurous science fiction, so I transferred the idea into the realm of mysticism and ultimately got this rather strange story.
As for "Drowsiness", I wanted to draw a classic horror story, to play on the familiar delightful feeling of blissful oblivion that overtakes people upon waking and is immediately replaced by the anxiety and unease caused by the return to the harsh real world, but the plot took its own course, and we ended up with a mystical thriller.
Junji Ito
01.26.2021