Title: Reiko the Zombie ShopMangaka: Rei Mikamoto
Age Group: Older Teens
Series is: Completed with 11 volumes
Volume(s) Reviewing: 1
My Rating: 4.5/5
You can't bring the dead back to life, unless you are Reiko. This young and beautiful high school student could easily have anyone who is deceased walking and talking again. Of course, only if you pay her well. But no worries, she'll charge depending on how much you make.
Popular with her services, Reiko encounters many dangerous cases. Known as Reiko the Zombie Shop, she'll always get the job done. Of course, it doesn't mean that the safety of her customers would be definite. After all, you are messing with the undead!
With my desperation for anything zombie-related, I scoured long and hard for any manga that contained some. Unfortunate, there isn't much. I lucked out though, discovering this title through Deb Aoki from the popular Manga About.com.
When I first saw the art, I was like "Hmm". Sometimes I found Reiko's head to be awkward compared to the rest of her body, but if you were to just see only her on the page, you wouldn't expect that there would be so much gore following after. While reading, the art sometimes went to the extreme, with guts everywhere. It wasn't creepy until I actually thought about the artwork and story once I was done reading.
A few of the situations that Reiko ended up in went by a little too quickly. What bothered me was the question on how did Reiko obtained the power to bring the dead back? Was it because she fiddled with dark magic? Through bloodline? The first volume never covered the background story of Reiko and I really wanted to learn more about her.
Despite all that, I enjoyed the manga. It gave great doses of creepiness, blood and zombies with interesting background stories to it. Reiko the Zombie Shop is a great read for horror fans but not to those who are not into mangas with quick, short stories.
