If you’ve never heard the name Junji Ito or read any of his works, then congratulations. You’ve been able to sleep a little more soundly at night.

Ito is a horror manga artist from Japan who revels in delivering his scares with tales of the strange, unnatural and the unexplainable. And copious amounts of body horror. He’s notorious amongst manga fans for his sheer ability to create nightmare fuel with his style of drawing and his love of putting his story’s protagonists through ungodly amounts of hell.

Out of the over one dozen volumes of his horror collection, and several stand-alone stories that can span many chapters, there are some that stand out above the rest, be it for their superior story or their extreme ability to make us squirm.

These are those exemplars in my book.
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Powet.tv is happy to announce our latest site Sailor Moon News. We’ve always been happy to bring you all the best in Sailor Moon content here at Powet.tv but now that there’s a new Sailor Moon anime planned for next summer the time seemed right to launch a dedicated Sailor Moon site.

Check us out at the new site, tell your friends and give us some feedback to tell us what kind of stuff you’d like to see more of.

The Sailor Moon anime turned 20 on March 7th of this year and to celebrate this milestone Nico Nico will be holding a live event which will include announcement of a “special surprise project” . Attending from Japan will be Sailor Moon anime voice actors Kotono Mitsuishi (voice of Sailor Moon) and Toru Furuya (voice of Tuxedo Mask) as well as Fumio Osano, the editor for many of Naoko Takeuchi’s manga who she refers to as “Osa-P” in liner notes. Also appearing from France will be the music group Momoiro Clover Z who’s colourful look is very reminiscent of the Sailor Team.

The event will take place on Friday July 6th at 7:30pm local Japanese time, 6:30am Eastern Standard Time. Though the event will be streamed online it would appear a paid membership is needed. Japanese pages with information can be found at Kodansha’s official site and Nico Nico’s site. English translations of these pages can be found on the Miss Dream Sailor Moon fan site.

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How times flies. 20 years ago today, on March 7th 1992, the first episode of Sailor Moon aired in Japan. 5 years ago I wrote this short article commemorating 15 years. Not a ton has changed in the past 5 years. The manga is being released again and a lot of merchandise has come out in the past few months but the rights issues with this now classic 20 year old anime series remain the same. You just can’t walk into a store and buy the greatest anime series of all time in North America.

Take a moment to think back on the show, an maybe watch an episode or two.

There’s a Japanese live action Rurouni Kenshin film in the works. It’s set to be released on August 25th 2012. Rurouni Kenshin is a popular manga turned anime series about a samurai with a dark past who fights with a backwards sword and hangs around with women and children to be a nice non threatening guy. When Kenshin holds his sword backwards, you know he means business!

The trailer looks pretty good, and not totally crappy like other manga turned anime turned live action movies like Death Note which sucked more than most movies could ever dream of sucking. With a solid story as source material there’s no good reason for this movie to suck, but it still might, like Death Note, which sucked really bad. I didn’t see Shishio in the credits so that’s promising.

The long anticipated fan made Sailor Moon movie has finally been released! You can watch the film online right now.

A great deal of effort has obviously gone into this fan film which features high quality costumes and effects and original music. The entire cast and crew did a great job putting this film together. Check it out and spread the word to other Sailor Moon fans.

Hot Topic, who previously had a number of Sailor Moon shirts on sale, as reported by Powet, has lots of new products on sale including a full on Sailor Moon Halloween costume.

The costume itself looks kind of cheap, but that cheapness is mostly relegated to the locket, tiara and hair covers. If a cosplayer used a locket toy and spend some effort into making more high quality versions of those cheap parts, they could put together quite a costume!

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It’s been infinity years since new Sailor Moon merchandise has come out in this continent so it’s great to see these 4 shirt designs available on the Hot Topic web site. The shirts are in girls junior sizes so they’re not exactly aimed at the adult man child demographic. Here’s hoping I fit into the 3XL shirts I ordered…

The four designs include a white shirt featuring Sailor Moon with her Cutie Moon Rod and black shirts featuring Sailor Mercury, Jupiter, Moon, Mars and Venus, Artemis and Luna with the slogan “We’re Purrrfect Together and Tuxedo Mask with the slogan “I Need A Hero!”.

Thanks to Mercurius at the Genvid Forums for noticing these and thanks to Sabrblade for making higher quality pictures of the shirts.

Don’t forget that the rerelease of the Sailor Moon manga in English starts on September 13th! Support Powet by preordering the Sailor Moon and Sailor V manga through the links below: