Reiko the Zombie Shop 6

Somehow, I followed up watching Grindhouse by reading this particular volume of manga.  The two… they’re very similar.  The first thing that happened in this volume was that a girl got her leg cut off.

Anyway, more and more insane stuff happens, though somehow it was a bit more tame than last volume.  Most of what goes on here involves the army, and by the end the group is fighting off one lone, insane assassin.  Yurikawa gets “killed” again, and I sincerely hope she comes back, because Yurikawa is probably my favorite part of this series.  Many other people meet their unfortunate ends as well, including the one character I would’ve liked to have seen stick around longer.  Of course, Reiko herself died and then brought herself back to life… actually, I see a way this character could go about this without thwarting the minimal logic in the story, so let’s see if that happens.

This volume is pretty violent, too.  There are bomb dogs.  I’m sure you can imagine.

Once again, not much plot to talk about, either.  This volume was actually one long contained fight scene.  You either like watching these characters hack each other apart gratuitously and nonsensically or you don’t, you’re not going to find much else here.  Myself, I think it’s awesome and also funny.  It feels wrong to read this volume so soon after the last one, and now I’m probably gonna have to wait forever to get the next.

Reiko the Zombie Shop 5

This volume was impossible to track down for some reason.

This series pains me, because it has no plot.  Not only does it have no plot, but whenever it tries to develop one, it ends it, then brings it back to life in completely nonsensical ways.  Why are Riruka and Yurikawa back?  Why?  They’re dead.  Several times over.

On the other hand, it’s hard to begrude a series where a character busts into a club, kills a dinosaur with a lead pipe, then says “I gotta get home!  The Road Warrior’s on tonight!”

Reiko the Zombie Shop 4

We’re back to one-shots in this volume, which I like a lot better than the twin sister arc. The one thing good that came from that arc, the Yurihara summon Zombie, I was sad to have lost, but the ending to this volume made me a little less sad.

There were good and bad one shots, certainly, but they all have that over-the-top charm that makes Reiko awesome. My favorite in this volume was a cleaning robot story that the mangaka explains in the back of the volume was a bit rushed because she forgot she had less pages. It’s really violent and awesome. The end story, though I liked it okay, was less good, and there is a terrorist story at the beginning that I also liked a lot.

That’s about it. Still ultraviolent, and we get an appearance briefly from that bounty hunter, but mostly just light stuff this time around.

Reiko the Zombie Shop 3

So this series screams AWESOME! as hard as it possibly can at all times. I like it. The stupid plot from last volume where Reiko has to fight her twin sister wraps up about halfway through this one. I actually liked the second half. Aside from the silly premise, I think one of my problems with it was that there were too many characters, as I fell in love with the one-shot Zombie Shop stories in the first volume. Well, too many characters ceases to be a problem very early on in this volume, and the rest involves a lot of melee weapons, Yurikawa, and chainsaws. Though I liked this part of it much better, the ending was, unfortunately, VERY stupid.

But after that’s over and done with, we get more Zombie Shop stories! We get one proper one, and after that two shorter, sillier stories that are just kind of bizarre, to say the least, but I think are mostly there for their comedic value (well, one is, the other’s got its own flavor of over-the-top dark humor). The Zombie Shop story was pretty awesome, it takes place in Hungary at a remote all-girls school. It had a twist I didn’t see coming, and I admire that when stories pull the wool over my eyes.

But yes, it’s still a really awesome series despite some of the lame things it does. I love it quite a bit, though I feel like I get better from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. If you want horror and humor, Reiko’s your girl.

Reiko the Zombie Shop 2

Man, I love this series. I love it hard. It’s so gory and so full of action and awesome situations, that it’s hard to scowl when Reiko summons Saki, the serial killer from last volume, again and again to fight on her behalf (unfortunately, Saki can’t say anything, though it would be hilarious if she could). The way she resurrects herself is amazing, and I’m so fucking glad I finally got this volume, because this series is amazing.

Just don’t look too hard at the plot. I’m serious. It got real bad here. I can smell it from the next room.

Reiko the Zombie Shop 1

This was pretty awesome. I was initially turned off by the art (as I really do not care for the eyes), but the stories are actually pretty cool. The only complaint I had with them was that they sometimes felt too short, but that wound up being okay.

It winds these two plots together that meet up at the end (and make me wonder how the series actually continues in volume two), one about Reiko doing her Zombie Shop thing for random people and one about this child killer, and Reiko finally gets set on the Child Killer case at the very end. The child killer thing was mildly disconcerting, as it’s pretty violent and does show quite a lot of gore against… well, kids. Plus the person’s a nutcase, but that wound up being okay. All those chapters were awesome, as was the final chapter, which was some sort of awesome. One of the Reiko chapters towards the end sort of stuck with me too, the one where she gets a rabbit that pees on her. That story was rather well-constructed and had several nice twists.

Hooray for this series!