Akira Tendo's a 24-year-old, in his third life-sucking year working for an ad company. Pulling multiple all-nighters, putting in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, getting screamed at by his boss, pining after the cute secretary that's sleeping with the CEO on the side. He staggers through days, deep bags under his eyes, barely aware of his surroundings, sleeping among the garbage of whatever quick ramen he ate for dinner at 3 a.m. He might as well be dead.
Then the zombie apocalypse happens, and the complete collapse of modern civilization means Akira doesn't have to go to work any more. He can clean his apartment, enjoy beer, confess his feelings to the cute secretary (who is already a zombie, but oh well.)
Surely though, there's more to do than that? Gradually accepting the notion of his mortality, and that, given the circumstances, it's a more immediate concern than usual, Akira makes himself a bucket list. Though he can only come up with 33 things initially, as he gathers more people to his little group, they start adding to the list.
The 19th volume was released in the U.S. last month, but I stopped after 6. Haro Aso had put together a decent group of 4 characters between Akira, his best friend Kencho, the conscientious and cautious Shizuka, and Beatriz, the German who just loves everything related to Japan. The bucket list concept lent itself to ridiculous adventures, like trying to deliver fish to a sushi chef, or apparently traveling into space in recent volumes.
Kotaro Takata's pretty good at drawing rotting zombies, and especially when things need to get a little weird. Like volume 2's zombie shark that, thanks to all the zombie humans it swallowed whole, can now move around on land. Because the zombie human's are standing up and their legs extended through the shark's rotting stomach. The art leans a little heavy on the cheesecake, even if you allow for the notion the story is mostly from Akira's perspective and he's single and wants not to be ("meet the woman of my dreams" is item 33 on his list.)
I feel like that's a trend growing steadily worse in most manga, so it isn't exclusive to Zom 100, and it isn't something that, on its own, would cause me to drop the book. Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General is a lot worse in that regard, and I've kept up with it through 12 volumes, and fully intend to buy the 13th. So why'd I let this book go? Partly, I didn't want to commit to a series that long.
But also, I think the post-apocalypse thing interests me in terms of what people do to survive (I wrote a little about it 11 years ago.) And the whole point of Zom 100 is, you could die any time. You can't content yourself to worry strictly about survival, you have to try and enjoy life. All the characters seem to have dreams of some sort - Kencho would like to be a stand-up comedian, Shizuka really wants to be a doctor - and I assume they pursue those amid all the zany adventures and fleeing zombies. Which is a good philosophy, but ultimately runs contrary to what I was looking for. Going to a casino to win big was not a thing I could picture someone deciding to do in a zombie apocalypse, even allowing for Akira and Kencho kind of being idiots.
No comments:
Post a Comment