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Junji Ito Nominated for Eisner Hall of Fame
posted on by Adriana Hazra
The organizers of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards announced on Friday that they have nominated horror manga creator Junji Ito for the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame. Voters will select which six of this year's 18 nominees will be the latest to join the Hall of Fame. The organizers already pre-selected late manga creator Shigeru Mizuki for induction into the Hall of Fame this year.
Pan-Asian film and entertainment studio Through the Lens Entertainment and horror brand Fangoria Studios are collaborating to produce films based on Ito's "The Mystery of the Haunted House" Parts 1 and 2, and "Bloodsucking Darkness."
Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, a new anime based on 20 different Ito stories, debuted worldwide on Netflix in January 2024. Ito's Uzumaki manga also inspired a four-episode anime mini-series that premiered on Toonami on September 28.
Junji Ito "Collection", a previous television anime of manga by Ito, also adapted stories from the Itō Junji Kessaku-shū collection, as well as the Fragments of Horror book. The anime premiered in January 2018 and had 12 episodes. Crunchyroll streamed the series with English subtitles as it aired in Japan, and Funimation streamed an English dub. The anime included an adaptation of Ito's Tomie story on its second and third DVD sets.
Ito's Uzumaki and Tomie manga have inspired live-action adaptations, and his GYO manga inspired an original video anime project.
The previous Japanese inductees of the Eisner Hall of Fame were Osamu Tezuka (2002), Kazuo Koike (2004), Goseki Kojima (2004), Katsuhiro Ōtomo (2012), Rumiko Takahashi (2018), Moto Hagio (2022), and Keiji Nakazawa (2024). Akira Toriyama and Naoki Urasawa were nominated in 2019, but were not among the four selected.
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