Cradle of Monsters by Kei Sanbe

 That is the end of Zombie Awareness Month 2016, I hope it gave you some insight on how to survive the zombie invasion when it comes. There is a really good tip in this manga, too.

When up against zombies, always go for the neck if you can.

I won't be posting next week because it's my birthday then and I don't feel like it. Plus, it will let me get ahead a little bit, which is good for a lazy person like myself. With school almost out, though, I won't have to worry about work anymore either. I should get some longer manga read finally.



Cradle of Monsters by Kei Sanbe


Genre: Seinen, Horror, Ecchi
Length: 6 Volumes – 41 Chapters

Art and story (c) Kei Sanbe

           I want to say the art is as good as the story, but there are a lot of extra lines in the clothes and background that I found distracting. The faces have a unique look to them, snub-nosed and grim but expressions aren't all that changeable. The eyes and hair have a lot of different looks to them, though, and the eyes especially show expression best

even if they look sinister when they don't need to. The action is follow-able and the gore has a good balance. It's not just guts everywhere or the like, but the blood and wound detail gives exactly what is needed in a zombie story. The backgrounds are there consistently, and really add to the dilapidated feel of the setting, even if it isn't immediately recognizable.
           When a maniac goes on a killing spree on a cruise ship, a group of high school classmates have to band together to protect one another, but when a tremor adds to the confusion and their ship capsizes staying together becomes the least of their problems. It seems like its more than just one man who has gone crazy and is killing people on sight. Is it simply coincidence that so much happened all at once? And can the small bands of survivors make it out alive?
           The last manga this year is the most 'horror' one of the three zombie stories. It has a proper plot that continues in a logical way and it has lots of characters to zombie-fy and murder off. I really enjoyed it, despite it being one of the type that shows panties (and towards the end just full naked shots) randomly. The zombie angle wasn't just expected to fly with no type of explanations and it

gives a good take on the process. There was a little bit of things getting convoluted towards the end when all the ends were being tied off, but nothing logic breaking. Everyone gets theirs so its pretty satisfying. Especially the long burn on a few of the more annoying characters that make you want to strangle them, in that fun-hate way, who get it in the worst way. The psychology was done pretty good, too, though at times it was repetitive, it wasn't too preachy. I was worried in the middle it would be a story that ends in tragedy and no one makes it out despite the terrible struggles they went through to try, and I would have liked this a lot less had that been the case, but its nice to have a horror manga that isn't just depressingly ended with no survivors. Not to say that everyone you expect to make it does, though. No deep spoilers, zipping lip. Well, except to say that one of the main characters randomly grew up in a circus and it just sorta seems to come out of left field with a tiger and from time to time other strange character actions or plot twists do happen like that but again, nothing breakable to the story.  The beginning is a little slow, though the terrible misspellings on my version of the manga did not help that, the story keeps things moving pretty good with the extra shots of random zombies and bad guys showing up at good intervals. Its not just that I didn't enjoy the first two zombie manga that make this one look good, I assure you. Zombies hungry for flesh on a sinking boat, it takes survival horror up one more notch.



4/5 Enjoyable and bloody escape story.

51 Ways To Save My Girlfriend by Usamaru Furuya

 May the 4th be with you! I had to baby sit my 3 year old niece so I made her watch the original Star Wars with me, it was fun. May also is Zombie Awareness Month, though I do not have enough zombie manga to post one every week this year, so I'm just going to save the zombies for later but I will recommend a few posts from last year that I found totally fun and would read again if I had the time but I started re-reading One Piece and catching up on new chapters and that is going to take some time I tell you what. Anyway, if you haven't read Sankarea yet, do so, as well as Unlucky Boy Undead Girl (its the third one down on this page but the first two are pretty good, too). Hopefully some ongoing manga will finish by next May, or the zombie apocalypse will actually happen, so I can find some then. Well, enough of this run on sentence riddled intro and on the the actual review...



51 Ways To Save My Girlfriend by Usamaru Furuya

Art and story (c) Usamaru Furuya

Genre: Adult Survival Horror
Length: 5 Volumes – 49 Chapters



           The art was pretty bad, but at times I found it perfectly pleasing. I really can't figure out this art at all, it has sort of a skewed look to it as well has having caricature-type designs to people so then the regular people tend to just look awkward. The clothes are interesting and all but they do not always seem to fit people very well. Initially I found the eyes off putting, then they sort of went from fine to empty randomly, and I had a hard time coping with what people were actually feeling. As this is a survival manga, there is a lot of crying and the tears are not realistic in anyway, just large obstructions in people's eyes. Its a bit of the 'ugly' man art that seinen get at times that are semi-realistic but then the main characters were rather less realistic looking so they didn't match a lot of the other characters. Let’s just say, the art isn't terrible.
           When a large earthquake hits Japan, a young man and a middle school friend who just happened to meet on the street, are thrown together in the most extreme circumstances.
           This manga is like Dragon Head, but less convoluted and more preachy. I realized when I was starting this blog that I would end up reading manga that I did not like, in fact I have quit manga or simply have not reviewed them because I didn't think I could even muster the energy to complain about them. This was almost one of those. What seems like

an interesting title and plot turns into just men trying to rape women for, like, three volumes straight. I am not exaggerating. Interspersed with the main characters are explanations of what would actually happen if an earthquake happened, such as ground water seepage and fire storms, but then what starts as a warning tale of people getting drunk and women being alone and in danger turns into the whole plot line instead of another warning taking over. I got really bored really quickly. I don't usually use this as a bad thing, but this manga is also very Japanese. The main characters are going through famous Tokyo landmarks and districts but as I only recognized about half of them, the two page spreads of the destroyed skylines really did nothing for me, let alone knew where they were in relation to where the characters were trying to get to. Japan has a real problem with the threat of earthquakes and its interesting to see an artist's idea of what would happen. That is why people like to read post apocalyptic stories, to imagine this world we have going to total hell and how people would cope. In this manga's case though, it actually seemed like it was giving advice at times but that advice was dispensed in long-winded fourth wall breaking dialog boxes that really begged to be skimmed instead of read carefully. Even the characters themselves aren't worth mentioning, they were so flat. All in all I feel like I wasted my time, unfortunately. At least this was much shorter than Dragon Head and has nothing to do with the government secretly drugging people. It does have the eyes, though.


1/5 Tiresome after a while and with art that is a little hard to take in.

Dragon Head by Minetaro Mochizuki

 Sorry, can't hear you I'm eating Corn Nuts *CRUNCH* *CRUNCH*



Dragon Head by Minetaro Mochizuki 

Art and story (c)

Minetaro Mochizuki

Genre: Survival, Sienen, Horror
Length: 10 Volumes – 89 Chapters


          The art is mainly realistic, as such it can be a little bracing at times, especially if the last thing you read was more shojo oriented. Still, Dragon Head has a practiced look and there isn't a lot to complain about. Its really the details that get in the way sometimes. At certain points, I felt like I
understood how stressed and worn out the characters were with out so much dirt on their faces or extra bags under their eyes. I mean, art like this can be hard to look at normally, but adding even more "ugly" on top of it doesn't make it any more palatable. The action isn't always easy to follow, either. I know this sounds really negative, and if you look at it you can understand what I mean when I say, I can't really describe the good parts beyond 'it is professional.' Take my word for it, the art is the best part of this if you can stand this more realistic style.
           When a bullet train derails in a tunnel, a single student finds himself alive amid all the corpses of his classmates. What caused the crash, he doesn't know, but he does know he's trapped in the darkness. Can anyone else have survived? Can he survive enough to be rescued? Or will he have to find his own way out before the darkness drives him mad?
           So, do you want to read a manga that’s a lot of philosophizing and pondering about human nature and then, at the end, gives no no answers but just rambles on about the same things it did in the first volume? Yeah, me neither, but I found one anyway. In my defense, the beginning is actually pretty interesting. Dragon Head, though it pulls you along with page turning, intense and engrossing situations, is equally bogged down by pages of exposition about human nature and what disasters do to society. The first few volumes, this balance isn't annoying or slowing, because, as the plot goes, the main character is stuck in a dark tunnel with no idea of why or how and the panic creeps in but when the situation changes, the conversations don't change. Then, instead of giving some sort of concrete answer at the end of things you just have to cobble together all the long winded things you've heard over ten volumes, and even then its shaky whether you really

understand anything at all, let alone the reason you had to slog through it. To pull a Dragon Head and repeat myself in slightly different wording, this manga is just such a long read of the same types of things happening again and again, I can't really say I enjoyed it now that I'm at the end. The look into teenagers trying to survive and understand something like a natural disaster starts out with promise, too, looking at madness and injury and how desperation never fades, but, after a while, things just get more muddled. There's some sort of side plot of people being fed drugs that get rid of fear, but why that was introduced is a mystery to me because it only makes things more confusing. And believe me, I am very confused, still, and have a lot of questions. How do those stitch headed people fit into the disaster? How much of the disaster was actually man made? What the hell did I just read and why did I spend so much time doing so? These answers cannot be answered, and I refuse to spend hours reading Dragon Head again just to try to make sense of some of it. This manga needed to dig a little deeper or at least give some sort of closure, instead of ending so swiftly. I was disappointed by this, to say the least, but as far as a natural disaster story goes, there is a lot of interesting things brought up, especially in the beginning. There is a bit of Japanese geography in it, too, that may have made things a little more confusing, but not much. A less clunky translation may have helped, too, but it was also only a minor problem. I have mixed feelings about how to rate this manga because of how much liked the beginning and how much I hated the ending. If this had ended around the third of fourth volume, as impossible as that would have been, I think I could have given it a three or four, but as it stands...



2/5 Confusing, but with an interesting start.