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Comic Review: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 12
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Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol. 12Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 12
Story by Eiji Otsuka
Art by Housui Yamazaki
Original Cover Design by Bunpei Yorifuji
Translation by Toshifumi Yoshida
Editor and English Adaptaion by Carl Gustav Horn
Lettering and Touchup by IHL
Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 21, 2012
Cover Price: $11.99

I hope you like high-concept because the best story in Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol. 12 involves haunted houses, struggling comedians, astral projection, dirty real estate deals, and a dude getting shot in the face with a nail gun, all in a brisk 75 pages that I must have read in under a half hour.

Full Disclosure, I wasn’t familiar with the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service series when I picked this volume up. It’s about five recent college grads with their own unique connection to the afterlife and who have formed a company which specializes in granting the dead their last wishes. Although, they seem to just kind of stumble into trouble. Think Ghostbusters by way of Scooby-Doo. But in Japan.

Don’t get too worried about characters and continuity, though. These small, self-contained stories read more like a variety show or, better yet, a series of ghost stories told around the campfire. The main characters serve as an entry point into the plot and then just hang out in the background, which makes this an easy read to pick up.

From the funny and twisted story about Second Life players in the first of three stories in this volume, to the surprisingly touching story at the end about “˜love doll’ perverts and Kim Jong Il, you can see pretty plainly that the common thread is dark, gallows humor. When it’s time for a big gross-out, writer Eiji Otsuka and artist Housui Yamazaki don’t pull any punches, but that’s not all that they’re going for. Each story tempers the blood and guts with its own unique blend of funny and sad.

It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down with any manga, so I forgot how entertaining they can be sometimes. I didn’t do back-flips for the book or anything, and it certainly isn’t up to, say, an Akira or Astro Boy, but there are so many simple pleasures to be found in Japanese comics. This is a book, for instance, where the art knows when to let the background disappear and just let the characters perform and when to have big, beautiful establishing shots. And those splash pages are big and beautiful.

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