Best Zombie Manga
Lovers of both anime and zombies can rejoice because Japan has caught its own case of zombie fever, producing a variety of zombie manga both traditional and unique.
You know what’s better than manga? Manga with zombies in it. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. After America, Japan is probably the world's #2 producer of zombies. Our fascination with zombies, of creating a new world via some warped death fantasy, has been the focus of just about every format from video games to Hollywood movies. But we can conclude that anime does the zombie genre best because, hey, anime is awesome! With that in mind, we reckon that these are some of the best zombie manga out there.
Zombie-Loan
Image via PEACH-PIT
If you had the ability to tell when someone’s about to die, what would you do? Michiru Kita – the schoolgirl star of Zombie-Loan doesn’t waste time doing homework. Instead, when she notices that two classmates who should be dead (they have a black ring around their neck, see) are knocking about as if they’re not, you know, festering corpses of the undead. Teaming up with the duo, she joins Zombie-Loan in order to hunt down zombies. Which is precisely what we’d do if we had special death-seeing powers.
Sankarea: Undying Love
Image via Mitsuru Hattori
Love is blind. It must be, if Sanakrea: Undying Love is anything to go by. Take one guy, Chihiro Furuya, who’s utterly obsessed with zombies (ask us if he wants to kiss a zombie and we’ll hang our heads in shame as we nod in the affirmative). Throw in a suicidal girl who drinks a resurrection potion she hopes might kill her – it doesn’t, but falling off a cliff does – and you’ve got the makings of one of the weirdest zombie romantic comedies ever. A zom-rom-com, if you will.
Read Sankarea: Undying Love Here
Highschool of the Dead
What is it about schools that draws zombies? Probably it’s either the fresh meat on offer like a cannibal buffet, or they just really love algebra. Highschool of the Dead (Yes, ‘highschool’ is all one word here for some reason) is more of your classic zombie thriller, making it one of the best zombie manga you can get. An undead apocalypse breaks out in Japan leaves a small cluster of school-kids and their nurse to survive in the wake of society’s collapse. It’s almost like a zombie road-trip, as the kids travel across town scavenging food, avoiding off-their-head survivors and wondering whether it’s even worth surviving now anyway (it is).
Read Highschool of the Dead Here
School-Live!
Image via Sadoru Chiba
Now this is a clever set-up for a story: After a zombie outbreak, schoolgirl Yuki Takeya spirals into pure crazy, deluding herself into seeing the world not as a zombie wasteland, but just as it was before the apocalypse. So that means going to class and gossiping with friends and generally having fun. Her pals in the School Living Club, on the other hand, are all too aware of their fragile existence as sole survivors, and doing anything they can to protect themselves. Which loosely translates into killing zombies.
Gungrave
Image via Yasuhiro Nightow
Cool title, cool art design, cool characters. Gungrave is just cool all over. The impossibly named Brandon Heat is a small-time criminal turned big shot in a crime syndicate who’s killed by his long-time friend, Harry, before being restored to life by a doctor – we’ve all been there. Along with, you know, not being dead, Heat is now known as ‘Beyond the Grave’, and sets out to destroy the syndicate, and his friend. Which sounds like a suicide mission, except he’s already dead. A neat twist on a familiar formula.
I Am a Hero
I Am a Hero has got to be the best zombie manga around. It’s also pure wish fulfilment, with the lead character, Hideo Suzuki, being a manga artist suffering paranoia and self-esteem issues, living a dead-end life. And as anyone who’s been depressed will know, sooner or later you’ll suddenly find yourself facing disease-ridden maniacs who are hooked in eating humans in the most brutal way possible. So what would you do? Because Hideo arms himself with a shotgun and does what any hero does – converse with an imaginary friend, consider the moral consequences of his actions, and kill the undead hordes. If you want a not entirely accurate sum-up, think The Walking Dead meets 28 Days Later. And better than both put together!
Tokyo Zombie
Image via Yusaku Hanakuma
Jujitsu. Haven’t you always wanted to be good at jujitsu? Professional slackers Fujio and Mitsuo have, wasting time idling dreaming of becoming champions of the art, and killing their boss before dumping his body… Wait, what? Oh yeah, these guys off their boss and leave the corpse in a toxic waste dump. Anyone with a basic understanding of zombie resurrection knows this is a big no-no, which leads to a whole undead army rising up to do what zombies do best: eat people.
Sunday Without God
Image via Kyle Jones
We can no longer have kids. We can no longer die. We’ve been abandoned by God. And we are so screwed because of it. Sunday Without God is a dramatic zombie manga that spotlights a 12-year-old gravekeeper, despatched by God to end the ‘lives’ of the undead (and unhappy) citizens. And what does every 12-year-old girl want? To rescue a world abandoned by God, of course. Not that she’ll do it alone – she joins up with a mysterious (and mysteriously immortal) gunslinger, Hampnie Hambart, another gravekeeper putting the undead where they belong.
Corpse Princess
Image via Yoshiichi Akahito
Is there a more zombie manga-style title than Corpse Princess? We don’t think so. It’s just so perfectly blunt and awesome. The lead character, Makina Hoshimura, is a corpse princess, forced to kill 108 other walking corpses in order to gain entry to Heaven. And man, does this princess murder in style – dual-wielding MAC-11 sub-machineguns that spit bullets like venom. Chuck in an anti-zombie Buddhist monk (you read that right) and a revenge quest storyline and you have a kick-ass zombie-killing manga you need to check out.
Reiko the Zombie Shop
Image via Rei Mikamoto
Going in the opposite direction, Reiko the Zombie Shop ain’t about a schoolgirl killing zombies, but about a schoolgirl resurrecting the dead – for a price, natch. She’s not doing it for fun, though, although it probably is fun if you do it; she’s doing it to gain info to solve murder cases. Pretty cool, huh, just ask a murder victim the name of the person who killed them. Never as simple as that though, as Reiko finds out when she faces off against a truly psychotic teen killer who just wants a younger sister, at any cost.
Read Reiko the Zombie Shop Here
Is This a Zombie?
Image via Sacchi
Because as we’ve seen, just what even is a zombie in manga and anime anyway? Well, Ayumu Aikawa definitely is one – that’ll explain the post-death resurrection thanks to a powerful, white-haired necromancer who guards the schoolboy and helps him defeat a whole ton of demons. But hey, this is zombie manga, so let’s have a ridiculously cool vampire ninja live with them too, as they try to discover the circumstances behind Ayumu’s death. Oh, and there’s some weird, magical cross-dressing in it too.
About the Creator
George Gott
Writer & Social Media Editor for Jerrickmedia who is an avid reader of sci-fi and a fierce defender of women, minority, and LGBTQ rights.
Keep reading
More stories from George Gott and writers in Geeks and other communities.
Deadliest Movie Sharks
You either love sharks or they scare the crap out of you. But if you’re like me, sharks both scare and intrigue you. Like me, many people are fascinated not only by a shark’s beauty, but also by the badassery predator instincts they have. In celebration of this year’s shark movie The Shallows, where our worst nightmares come alive of getting stranded on a rock in the middle of an shark waters are told by actress Blake Lively, we are honoring the best ‘sharkplotation’ movies of all time. The following movies will either make you never want to go in the water again or make you laugh your ass off due to the sheer plot absurdity. From the classic shark movies to the most outlandish like shark ghosts to the campiest sharks attacking from the sky, there is no place safe from any shark attack. Seriously in the end, don’t we all eventually get eaten by sharks?
By George Gott8 years ago in Geeks
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
‘The Pearl’ is a well-known by under-read classic and, as a teacher, many of my students have absolutely loved it. Not just because it is short, but because it presents a storyline that is interesting and corrupting. Easy to read and easier to analyse, ‘The Pearl’ is one of Steinbeck’s hardest hitting classics with an underlying message about protecting what is actually important. By the end of the book, the reader is left defeated and believing in the wrong thing. The idealism around this book is incredible and it is so dark too. For a long while you are supporting the wrong people, thinking in the wrong way and the whole story becomes one long act of misdirection by Steinbeck to show in a ‘Monkey’s Paw’ fashion why we should never chase wealth and status.
By Annie Kapur20 days ago in Geeks
First Starlight of Summer
Your whole being is constituted by yearning. You miss the stars but have never seen a fully-realized night sky sparkle to life before your eyes. You write things, funny but short but profound, emulating the archaic cosmos that turns by its own unknowable calculus emulating love in all its celestial glory turning in that same cryptic way, but fully know neither and hardly know both, and it feels disingenuous, so you write about writers. It feels vaguely masturbatory, but it’s funny but short but profound and it impresses the people around you enough, so you run with it forever until you can’t anymore.
By Steven Christopher McKnight3 days ago in Fiction
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.