Reiko Himezono, the title lead of Rei Mikamoto's awkwardly titled manga series, Reiko the Zombie Shop (Dark Horse Manga), is a teenaged girl with powerful necromantic abilities. Brandishing a palm emblazoned with a "summoning circle," invoking the name of Satan, the shapely high schooler (she's rarely shown wearing anything but her school uniform) raises the dead for a sliding fee.
This only occasionally appears to work out well for her customers, since the dead typically rise with some serious unfinished business on their zombie minds. And though our heroine advises her clients to secure their to-be-revived dead ones, this advice is typically ignored. Gory mayhem is the inevitable result: always listen to your necromancer, kids!
As you might guess from the above, Mikamoto's horror manga is over-the-top and campy, short on logic and long on blood-&-guts. I dug it, but keep in mind I'm a guy who watches Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks on a Sunday morning.
Book One of Dark Horse's English translation of this 11-volume series contains seven stories — one of which apparently was initially serialized in three parts –- most of which are given the simple title of "Act." In "Act 3," for instance, a science teacher/mad scientist who has been attempting to clone the body of a girl suicide hires Reiko. Unable to revive her clone because "her desire to die was so great that those desires were imbedded all the way into her DNA," he enlists our heroine's necromantic abilities to zombify the clone.
Unfortunately, Reiko's powers also extend to all the other bodies in the general vicinity, which leads to the revival of two decades' worth of failed experiments that the obsessed scientist had walled in his lab. Gory you-know-what ensures, with Mikamato upping the ante on his already outlandish premise by telling us that the cloned girl was pregnant – and so is her clone! (So how does that work, anyway?) Nasty? Wait 'til you see that panel of the zombie fetus bursting out at its "daddy"!
This is clearly not a series that's gonna be embraced by the professional culture scolds.
Though some small gestures are made toward establishing a supporting cast in the first book (there’s a girl with big glasses who'd appear to be Reiko's "friend" in two of the stories), the primary focus is on our young mercenary necromancer. We're not told much about Reiko except that she's no-nonsense when it comes to business and quite loud about her refusal to do any work for free (though we do get to see her revive a dead puppy). She's unfazed by any of the grisly sights thrown at her in the course of day's work – which in this series can be plenty grisly indeed.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!