365 Days of Manga, Day 243: Zombie-Loan

ZOMBIE-LOAN • Peach-Pit • Yen Press •16+
Michiru, a sad orphan girl with glasses and pathologically low self-esteem, contemplates ending it all…until she meets Tachibana and Akatsuki, two vaguely amoral, hot boys who have escaped death by working as killers for Zombie-Loan, supernatural loansharks who deal with the undead. Tachibana is hot-spirited, Akatsuki is cool, and the two ill-matched bishonen (together with other wacky and invariably good-looking zombie-hunters like the big-breasted, chipper, occasionally lesbian Koyomi) give Michiru a new reason for existence, hanging out with Zombie-Loan and mopping the floor of their office. Eventually, Zombie-Loan must fight against a secret society of zombie-creating bad guys. Zombie-Loan combines karaoke parties and wacky character hijinks (”Aww, the endless bickering and squabbling of two men born to kill each other! That’s true male friendship!”) with undead-blasting battles and sad character backgrounds; at the beginning of the manga Michiru is almost too depressing to sustain the reader’s interest, and later, as Michiru brightens up, the other characters take turns revealing the depths of their tragic pasts. The violence and creepy horror–bloody battles with chainsaws and swords, blobs of zombie flesh, a serial killer eaten alive by his own horde of zombie rats–strain the limits of Peach-Pit’s style-over-substance art, but Peach-Pit mostly meets the challenge and manages to keep things more exciting than their claustrophobically emo Rozen Maiden. The fantasy elements are well-handled, and in the end it’s a well-executed action-horror-comedy. In typical Yen Press style, the English rewrite is foul-mouthed, giving the dialogue a harder edge and making the whole book seem more ‘adult’ (”Is your brain made of shit or curry?”).
** 1/2 (two and a half stars)
Today’s winner is Clint E. of Tennessee. Congratulations, Clint!