Uzumaki Review

The idea should not work at this length. One geometric form is the antagonist, and Ito spends chapter after chapter finding the spiral somewhere new: a man's obsession with a shell, hair that curls of its own will, a maternity ward, a lighthouse, eventually the town's own layout. What keeps it from becoming a list is that the escalation has an internal logic, and the ending pays it off with a reveal about the place itself that recontextualises the first volume.

The art is why this is canon. Ito draws clean, well lit, almost antiseptic panels and then puts something impossible in the middle of one, and that restraint makes the eventual full page horrors land far harder than clutter would. Kirie and Shuichi are functional rather than interesting, and the serial format leaves several chapters that could be removed without loss. Read it in as few sittings as possible. The cumulative effect is the point, and by the row house chapters the book reaches somewhere very few horror comics do, where the dread is structural instead of event driven.