Art and Composition: 8/10 Story and Themes: 5/10 Characters: 4/10 Overall: 7/10 Art and Composition: Kazuo Umezu once again knocks it out of the park in the art department, delivering a unique, detailed style that (in my opinion) surpasses his work on Snake Woman. The faces of characters and the backgrounds of scenes are two aspects that I find particularly impressive, and it’s clear to see the effect that his work would have on future mangaka such as Junji Ito. Story and Themes: Orochi is an anthology of stories all connected by the immortal and supernatural narrator, Orochi, and her hobby of watching people (especially boys) grow up into adults. It’ssurprisingly not as creepy as it sounds. Like many anthology series, the stories in Orochi differ in quality from quite good to not very good, although the good most certainly outweighs the bad (The only story I did not care for was “Key”). Each individual story has a different theme or philosophical question (although some overlap thematically with others), ranging from what makes a person “good” to how parental pressure can negatively influence a child. They are all quite interesting, and they are nice to think over as Kazuo slowly increases the terror.

Characters:
The characters in Orochi are passable, with as much depth as one could probably accomplish in an anthology. No characters are particularly offensive, but not many stand out as particularly good either. They exist to facilitate the story, and they do a good job at doing so.

Orochi is pretty good! If you like Junji Ito’s work (or just psychological horror in general) or just want to see where horror manga got its roots, I’d say that Orochi is worth a read. It’s pretty spooky at times, and I’d argue that makes it worth reading all by itself. :p