21 year old Akira gets his dream job at a production office - only to find that his company is one of Tokyo’s notorious black corporations. Black corporations make you work way, way beyond your contracted hours, insisting you pull all-nighters and rack up thousands of hours of unpaid overtime. But it’s his dream job - he’s gotta stick it out!
3 years later…
Exhausted to the point of burnout, Akira has recently begun dreaming of suicide as a way out of going to work. Thank god the zombie apocalypse has just happened! Now he can do all the things he always wanted in his (previously nonexistent) spare time - and he’s gonna write them down so he gets to do them all in a Bucket List of the Dead.
Haro Aso and Kotaro Takata’s Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Volume 1 is such a fun book. It’s a refreshingly upbeat take on the stale zombie genre with a vibe akin to Zombieland rather than the more sombre Living Dead movies.
I love that Akira just accepts that the zombie apocalypse has just happened and gets on with life. Aso doesn’t write any backstory explaining it either. It’s like when Tom Holland became Spider-Man and Marvel ignored retelling his origin for the umpteenth time - it doesn’t really matter because we already know.
Instead, the zombies are just an inconvenience to be avoided while Akira sets out to have fun for a change. Like finally telling the girl he’s been crushing on at work that he loves her, has a joyride on a cool motorbike, stocks up on beer, and reunites with an old friend he’s lost touch with.
The metaphor of office workers as zombies isn’t an original one though it does highlight a genuine problem in Japan and black corporations are unfortunately real. There’s even a word for death by overwork: karoshi.
It’s an older boy’s manga so there’s a few too many gratuitous bewb and butt pics. Shizuka, the mysterious girl Akira meets on his beer run, looks like a fun addition to the cast though she seems to be the archetypical competent hot girl to Akira’s grinning bumbling doofus.
The first part of the title is a bit crap - just call it Bucket List of the Dead rather than add Zom 100 (a pun on “Top 100”?) - and Akira comes off too cartoony at times in the way he takes the new world order in his stride. I get that zombies are ubiquitous in our culture now but still, you’d think he’d be a little bit unnerved at its sudden intrusion in his reality!
These are just very minor critiques though - overall, I really enjoyed this one. The story was well-developed and characters - all of them likeable - were added at just the right moment to keep things interesting. I was entertained the whole time and wanted more as soon as I finished this first volume - a great sign!
Like the best genre stories, this one isn’t really about the monsters - they’re just the background and/or plot catalyst. This is about young people turning their back on traditional society (the subtle criticism being it should be torn down because it’s rotten) and instead doing what they really want like pursuing happiness in life, and it’s a really uplifting read as a result.
This is a great start to a very promising new series - Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Volume 1 is the best manga I’ve read in a while.
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