MJ Reviews: Zombie Loan Volume One

[Eric]

Title: Zombie Loan
Volume: 1
Mangaka: Peach-Pit
Originally serialized in: G Fantasy (Square Enix)
Genre: shounen, supernatural
Licensed by: Yen Press

Zombie Loan #1 opens with Michiru running through the school halls, hauling lunches for all the popular girls who use her to do the grunt work they don’t want to do. As she’s bringing lunch, she slams into two bishies known as Boy A and Boy B from a news report about unidentified boys A and B, the only survivors of an overpass collapse six months prior. Boy A is Shito and he’s known as ‘cool and nice,’ while Boy B is Chika, the tough guy all the girls want to know.

The problems start when the boys talk to Michiru in front of the popular girls, who -- as is common with the popular cliques -- are just using Michiru to do their errands for them. Naturally, Michiru getting attention from the good looking boys makes the popular girls jealous, so they steal her glasses. As it turns out, Michiru doesn’t need them to see, she needs them to prevent a peculiar type of sight she has: the ability to see those who are about to die. Possessing shinigami eyes, Michiru sees impending death as a grey collar slowly going black as death comes nigh. She sees collars on Shito and Chika’s necks and realizes they are about to die.

Later, after school, she sees the boys exchanging hands (they come off at the mid-forearm) and realizes A and B didn’t survive the overpass accident, at least not completely. They’re in a strange spot, neither truly dead nor alive, but if they do a certain number of jobs for someone known as the Ferryman, they’ll get their lives back (this is rather ambiguous at best). These jobs include demon killing and hunting down those who are walking around ‘alive’ past their death dates. The boys decide rather than kill Michiru for catching them, they’ll use her special eyes to help them find their targets, a very dangerous proposition at best, but Michiru doesn’t care. Her parents are dead, she has survivor guilt and she knows her relatives sort of see her as a burden. Michiru figures she’s better off dead, something that she’s going to regret by the end of volume one, which brings some life changes for Michiru.

I had caught the freebie sampler Yen put out a while back, giving a teaser on their new line. This was one of them in the sampler so when I had a chance to review it, I jumped at it. It was a very interesting read. The storyline is engaging. Michiru is a bit of a typical orphaned minor that we see often -– for that matter the boys are pretty archetypal too -– but they’re interesting enough to hold my attention. The boys bicker a lot and the banter is fun.

The art, however, isn’t to my tastes. It’s not bad but there are proportion problems, especially with the pencil-like necks. However, when the time comes to be creepy, the art works well. I do hate Michiru’s glasses which extend from above her eyebrows to her mouth -- talk about owl eyes. Now I usually don’t critique the technical stuff often or hard but how they did the special effects might not be to everyone’s taste. They leave the sfx in Japanese, then translate it phonetically then translate it to English all on the same page. Personally I could have done without the phonetic translation since its gets cluttered on in the panels. But even with the few minuses, this still is a good entry into the supernatural niche and I’d like to see more.

Reviewer: Cornerofmadness
Proofer: Iliana
Editor: Eric Turner