Sankarea by Mitsuru Hattori

Though I ran into some trouble finishing this in a timely matter, I've got another zombie manga post coming this weekend to further my training and research on this fascinating subject of the living dead. I hope this romanticized story will amuse and teach you, as well. (Also, I'm trying something new with my graphics, but Blogger and I seem to be disagreeing violently so just bear with me...)

Sankarea by Mitsuru Hattori

 

Genre: Romance Shonen
Length: 11 Volumes – 56 Chapters plus some extras

            The art, even from the beginning is very professional and clean looking, and it steadily improves from that point as well. Some of the character designs are a little generic, and forgettable, most of them are just background people though like the extra eye candy girls and the main character's friends (who are quickly forgotten anyway) so it isn't really a problem but a couple times when there was a title page with girls on it I had to stop and remember where they came from. Everyone else, though, is

This annoying face is the one I mean

distinctly different and easy to identify, the main character's cat ears hair for example is awesomely cute and interesting. The clothing is pretty unremarkable, but if, like me, you are making note of it it has nice details, especially the zombie movie references on t-shirts and the like. The backgrounds are of the same vein, there is quite a lot of backgrounds and ambiance given to them that really set the tone of the manga, but nothing particularly note worthy about it. There is one aspect that bothered me though, the blush lines. I think I've talked about distracting blush lines before, but in this case it wasn't when people were blushing that the lines bothered me, there were times where a triangle of blush was spread across the bridge of the nose and it was so distracting on the one character that had it all the time that I disliked her even more than I would have with out it.That was the one thing though, all the zombie graphics were done really well, and the juxtaposition of it next to all the pretty girls really works well to set it apart from other manga.

Just run away from the freak, girl, seriously

            Chihiro Furuya loves all things zombie, from the cute, to the gory, to the strange, he has seen it and enjoyed it, and even admits himself that his only interest is in zombie girls. Yet, when he meets Rea Sanka, by all appearances a lady of a high class family, screaming into a well all her frustrations, Chihiro can't help but be little bit interested. The two start a friendship of convenience once Rea learns that Chihiro knows about her concealed outings so he tells her his secret, too. You seen, since his cat died Chihiro has been trying to create a zombie of the animal so that the two of them can have some more time together. Rea, surprisingly, decides she is going to help him and the two studiously try to decipher an old notebook Chihiro found where the description of a 'resurrection drug' is written. Still, Rea has one condition, if she dies Chihiro has to bring her to life and accept responsibility for her!             I was a little worried at first due to the amount of skin I was seeing right off the bat, when a manga has down-the-shirt shots and random jumps to girls getting naked to take baths one starts to wonder if it will just degrade into a harem manga with out much plot, but despite the nudity, the story was actually really engaging. I was never really quite sure how the ending would come about, if it would be miraculously happy or horribly depressing. Now that I've finished it, though, I'm still not quite sure which one it was... All the same, even though one of them becomes a zombie, Chihiro and Rea are still very real feeling and their actions seem logical and normal in the situations they are handed. Chihiro does as he promises and Rea's wish to be normal is given a full chance, until things turn completely 'zombie' of course. A false sense of security is a plot device often employed by zombie movies, after all. The zombie

Making fun of it's self a little here

explanations were actually kind of a fresh take, even the reason behind why they want to eat flesh, or how they come to be living again, so that it feels different though the same, and when I'm looking for a zombie story its always nice to find something unlike what you've seen before. It wasn't with out problem, I already mentioned a certain character getting on my nerves every time she interferes, and I couldn't stand her hair, either, it was always dangling in her face even though she wore a hair clip, and while you become sympathetic to her situation I just couldn't become attached to her like I did the rest of characters. This manga also has a few times where things just don't move forward when they could have, or things are left dangling instead of just getting them over with. As a reader, it left me fed up from time to time, but the pacing does draw you along really well despite the few hiccups of plot. I don't remember a time not wanting to see what was happening next to the couple. The ending also felt like a bit of a cop-out, though it wasn't unsatisfying in its own way, it didn't fix the problems that were presented fully in the beginning of the story. The heart of the love story was there through out, the humor was there, and even the gore was there, and if I ever feel like reading it again, I can buy it in English myself, which is always a bonus.

5/5 A full zombie love story with plenty of originality.

            As far as teaching zombie awareness goes, I'd say it gives a good idea of what zombies are like. They will bite you if you are not careful about it, but, unlike Chihiro, you will not survive the bite! It also explains zombie anatomy pretty well, despite the subject being a high school girl, the fact that they have not the limitations of pain like humans do, that they will rot, that they will never heal the wounds they are inflicted, and, most of all, they want nothing more than to eat the flesh of the living.

Just like this poor sap has just discovered