Zombie Loan Vol.#01

By: Greg Hackmann
Review Date: Monday, December 31, 2007
Release Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2007



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:PEACH-PIT
Translated by:Christine Schilling
Adapted by:

What They Say
A girl and two boys spin a soulful tale of death and resurrection.

Michiru Kita's a weak-spirited girl who has a hard time saying what's on her mind. One day, she notices mysterious, ring-like markings around the necks of two of her classmates, Chika Akatsuki and Shito Tachibana - two boys who miraculously survived a horrible accident six months ago. Michiru, possessing the rare ability to see these rings, knows that they warn of impending death. Thinking that, perhaps, she can do something to save her classmates' lives, she approaches them... but it seems the boys have already made a different kind of deal and garnered themselves a heavy debt...

The Review
Zombie-Loan's numerous artistic, plotting, and pacing problems make this volume an outright chore to read.

Packaging:
The front cover manages to be both attention-grabbing and drab at the same time, with a vertically-split and darkly-shaded portrait of Michiru and Chika staring down the reader. The back cover offers up the standard story summary along side a small, minimally-colored scene of Michiru, Chika, and Shito posed menacingly on a set of stairs. The printing inside is clean and sharp (though, as noted below, it's sort of wasted on the source material).

Apart from a brief translator's notes appendix, the only extra is a two-page thank-you spread from Peach-Pit.

Artwork:
The artwork in Zombie-Loan is generally dull and lifeless, with signs of corner-cutting to top it all off. The most notable feature here is Michiru's character design, which features the stereotypical "sauced-sized eyes, even bigger glasses" innocent waif look, replete with impractically-long ponytails. While this kind of design may be Peach-Pit's bread-and-butter, I'm not a big fan of it; and it sticks out like a sore thumb alongside the other characters, which have more conventional character designs.

To make matters worse, the art here is filled with errors and half-measures. Clothing and backdrops are almost completely textureless, rarely consisting of more than solid black-and-white patches. Where texture is used, it's lazily done: plaid patterns on clothing are applied as if by flood fill, with uniformly-sized and -angled crosshatching patterns no matter how the cloth is oriented; other panels feature backdrops that form a kind of halo around the characters, seemingly to save Peach-Pit the effort of filling the entire page in. Characters spend most of the volume staring head-on at the reader, since they go off-model virtually every time they tilt their head even slightly away. And in one really awkward full-page illustration, Michiru's kneecaps have migrated to about a foot above the place where her leg actually bends.


Text/SFX:
While the dialog is often trite and whiny, Yen Press's translation of it reads about as well as you can expect given the source material. There are no obvious typos or grammatical oversights. There's a short translator's notes section at the back, which is always a welcome addition as far as I'm concerned.

Yen Press has taken an interesting approach to translating the SFX by providing margin notes with the English translation and the Romanized version of the Japanese lettering. Depending on your point-of-view, this is either an extra step in presenting a faithful translation of the original work, or just unnecessary clutter that provides little useful information to the reader. (I'm leaning slightly towards the "unnecessary clutter" camp.)

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Things kick off with an attention-grabbing cold open: a girl lying in a pile of her own blood is being delivered the news that she's about to die. As the story shifts slightly back into the past, we discover that this girl is a high-school student named Michiru Kita, whose hobbies and talents seem to mainly revolve around dropping things and running into people. Her endless capacity for clumsiness causes her to literally collide headfirst into fellow students Shito Tachibana and Chika Akatsuki, affectionately known throughout the school as "A-Kun" and "B-Kun" after surviving a freakish car accident. While Michiru's classmates are impressed that the mysterious duo have lowered themselves to talk to her, she's unnerved by the black rings she sees around their necks -- a product of Michiru's psychic ability to foresee imminent death.

Things turn even more sinister later that night, when the two begin demanding reparations from Michiru for dropping their food during their run-in. Michiru follows them home to warn them of their black rings, only to be interrupted by an impromptu attack from a zombie puppy. After Shito and Chika save the day, placing Michiru into their eternal debt both literally and figuratively, they see a business opportunity in her special abilities. You see, the duo are in employ of Zombie Loan, whose business model somehow involves hunting down the undead; Michiru's skills are understandably useful in this line of work. Unfortunately, as can be guessed from the first page, their investment goes sour when Michiru is mortally wounded on her first assignment, leaving Shito and Chika no choice but to invoke one of Zombie Loan's lesser-known business ventures.

Comments
Zombie-Loan feels pre-manufactured to pander to a certain core audience of readers who want nothing more than to see Catholic schoolgirls duke it out with zombies -- and the heck with everybody else. If you're one of those people, stop reading right here and go pick up a copy; I'm guessing Zombie-Loan will probably be right up your alley. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there are major plotting and artistic problems here that are just too significant to ignore.

Apart from the sloppy artwork, the most glaring problem with this volume of Zombie-Loan is the horrendous pacing. It takes nearly four out of the book's six chapters to get to the point where something remotely interesting happens, and the story's real premise is revealed with a whopping seven pages left to go. Rather than focusing on moving the story forward, Peach-Pit instead spend most of the page count regaling the reader with amusing tales of Michiru moping around school in her uniform; Michiru moping around her house in her pajamas; Michiru moping around outside in her uniform; and Michiru moping around school in her uniform again, except this time at night.

When we do get hints of plot development here and there, it's generally an incidental side effect of one of the other characters taking advantage of Michiru's pushover personality rather than her acting of her own volition. Chika and Shito come across as completely unsympathetic because of this: our first exposure to the duo is when they start bullying Michiru over a matter of 500 yen. This incident gradually escalates to full-fledged harassment, until they practically drag Michiru kicking and screaming into the zombie-hunting business.

With such unlikable characters, a story that moves at a glacier's pace, and unattractive artwork, Zombie-Loan has very little going for it at this point. Skip it.