Review by Frank Plowright

Four people meet for the first time, having chatted together in an online suicide forum. They’ve decided to kill themselves. Barrachi has a disfiguring birthmark that covers half her face. Maruso has glimpses of the future and feels hers will become a series of disasters. Pii-Tan works in a laboratory where his robot duplicate has been constructed and he now feels inferior. Taburo keeps seeing his doppelganger and believes it to be a sign of his impending death. They drive to the forest, but in the end none of them die immediately.

Junji Ito’s short horror stories are disturbing and imaginative, and he applies the same creativity to this completely bonkers extended story. It might as well be a collection of short pieces as the continuity is minimal and largely based on the concerns introduced early. If Ito is struck by a new idea, in it’s shovelled, even if it makes little sense in the wider scheme of things. At one point a character becomes a portal to another dimension and starts vomiting up spheres of a previously unknown mineral; the souls of the dead return and a mad doctor experiments at creating new life forms. Once an idea is introduced and the consequences explored Ito moves on, whether or not there’s a neat tying up of the possibilities. It’s the same eccentricity governing Ito’s short stories, just more obvious as Black Paradox isn’t confined to a single idea.

Always a first rate artist, Ito defines the cast and their surroundings in detail, along with his signatures of  abundantly inked panels signifying moments of extreme terror and a fair amount of gloopy horrors. You know what you’re getting with Ito and he’s not shy providing it.

Black Paradox leaves the door open for a sequel, but this disjointed dark dream stands well enough without it.