But I'm not speaking to artists I'm speaking to the qualities of reading. Of course, many serious artists have resisted the quality of empathy and humanness I bet you all can even think of some successful name that has premised their art on the appropriation and/or recontextualization of manga images not unlike Itō's - a menagerie of fauna. Moreover, I think this means of seeing art has a way of situating the artist in an eternal present: ever-consumable - because when you are on the internet you are often making money for somebody, be they scan aggregate sites and ad-powered piracy apps or social media platforms that survive on the glamour of their necessity as communication tools - but divorced from the relevant contexts that speak to the evolution, the fixations, the historical situation of the aesthetic project, and the other means by which we might begin to develop a greater literacy. The arguments you've heard on this topic are generally economic: to pirate manga is to steal money from the creators of manga, so go out and buy a lot of books and support the scene! Yet despite their visibility, Itō's small works have been slow to arrive in formal translated publication, perhaps because the extent of their piracy has made them a dicey investment for publishers the big shōnen titles will sell regardless of scans, since that pump is already primed, but 20-year-old horror shorts are a different thing. Yet I wonder if this sliver of ubiquity, carved off by the endless posting and reposting of images that drive so much of social media, risks transforming Itō into a type of internet fauna: a Junji Itō that merely exists, ex nihilo, without consideration of the reality inhabited by the artist. I don't know if those names come directly from Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (Kodansha Comics, 2015 emphasis added), but this is an artist at a level of general visibility high enough that I can't discount the possibility out of hand. There's pair of cats named in the story: Yan and Mu. Junji Itō, of course! Or: I'm sure you've heard of the Kristen Roupenian short story 'Cat Person' by now. 'Who drew this?' someone inevitably asks.

This is another way of saying that his comics are pirated a lot enough so that the initial acts of piracy become stock for subsequent excerpts and details, often posted out of affection. And, provided you are extremely online, you've also heard of Junji Itō, surely among the most internet-famous of horror cartoonists, whose works are passed around - be they full stories or juicy images - on any platform for the dissemination of images you can think of.

Hey, wanna hear a scary story? The internet has transformed the impulse for expressing affection into a dehumanizing and monetizable force! Well, I didn't say it was going to be a new story.

Shiver junji