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Flipped!: David Welsh On Omukae Desu And The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
posted July 6, 2009
 



By David P. Welsh

If forced to pick a favorite genre of manga, my choice would be surprisingly simple. I really love comics about the recently deceased. I'm not talking about ghost stories in general, though these examples fall under that umbrella. I'm more interested in stories about the travel agents who help these displaced spirits move on to whatever comes next.

There are several reasons for this. The agnostic in me likes the democracy of the afterlife systems portrayed in these stories. Everyone moves on, regardless of whatever abstract concepts of virtue they manifested in life. There's also orderliness to it; there's an infrastructure in place to make sure even the most reluctant spirit gets where it needs to go.

Beyond the generally benevolent philosophy behind the genre, there's also the remarkable flexibility the concept affords creators. These stories cross demographic categories, cropping up in everything from bubbly comedies for kids to grainier tales for grown-ups. Tones can range widely, from funny to romantic to wistful to horrific. It's fertile narrative ground.

As is often her wont, shônen superstar Rumiko Takahashi blends comedy, adventure and folklore in Rin-Ne, which is being serialized online by Viz. In it, a pert girl and a surly supernatural type join forces to maintain the spiritual traffic flow. The boy is sort of a shinigami, an agent of death who helps reluctant spirits complete their unfinished business so they can leave the mortal realm. The girl is utterly average aside from her ability to see spirits and the fact that she doesn't scare easily. It's a funny and lively comic, though it has yet to achieve the kind of sweep Takahashi has generated in her other folkloric adventures. It's early yet, though, and it's hard to be too impatient with something you can read for free, especially when it comes from a talent like Takahashi.

Meca Tanaka's Omukae Desu (CMX), a shôjo example, won me over right from the start. The series distinguishes itself with its portrayal of the afterlife as a dorky, often dysfunctional bureaucracy that relies on human subcontractors to keep up and on generally mortifying theme days to boost employee morale. High-school student Madoka can see spirits, and he can even allow them to take over his body for brief periods. This makes him an ideal part-timer for the GSG, the agency tasked with the orderly departure of spirits from the living world to wherever they're headed. His primary contact from the company is a scruffy guy with a bad attitude who routinely wears a bunny suit. A cute girl who died too young and an outwardly surly young (living) woman round out the regular cast. Goofy workplace comedy is Tanaka's forte, but he still manages to wring pathos and sweetness out of the various spiritual predicaments.

My favorite example of the genre is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse), a shônen-verging-on-seinen series written by Eiji Otsuka and illustrated by Housui Yamazaki. It takes full advantage of the genre's possibilities, blending comedy, drama, mystery and horror. It also reminds me an awful lot of Scooby Doo.

In it, five students of a Buddhist college try and turn their un-employability into an entrepreneurial asset by helping restless spirits complete their earthly business with the promise of some sort of payout after services are rendered. Unfortunately, the payoff generally comes in the form of improved karma, but it's fun watching the group try and fail.



Karatsu is the group's ascot-free Fred; he can talk to the dead. Sasaki is a much hotter but still bespectacled Velma; she started the service and uses her prodigious computer skills to research their cases and find new markets to penetrate. Daphne duty is done by cute-as-a-button Makino, who learned the art of embalming in the United States. Shaggy and Scooby (and perhaps even Scrappy) are shared between stoner-type Numata, who can detect dead bodies via dowsing, and nerdy Yata, who claims to channel an obnoxious alien through his ever-present hand puppet.



Most of their classmates come from families already in the temple or mortuary business. As the Kurosagi crew nears graduation, they realize that they don't stand much of a chance of gainful employment, so they try to apply their less conventional skills in money-making ways. The series starts at a forest that's popular with suicides. Thus begins the team's travels through the often-bizarre world of death in Japan, spanning belief systems, folklore, urban legends, fads and even current events. (In one story, they must compete with the soon-to-be-privatized postal system which has its own eye on supplemental sources of income.)

Otsuka seems to have had a great time digging up the oddities of death and folding them into his stories. They vary in length from single-chapter outings to volume-long mysteries, and the tone can shift drastically but effectively. Some have a sweet, funny melancholy; others are positively gruesome. It all depends on how the corpse got that way, really. He's less successful with subplots. They're in evidence, but they can vanish for volumes at a time. But the subject and the appealing cast of characters offer all kinds of narrative possibilities, so a bit of attention deficit is more than excusable.



Yamazaki's illustrations are marvelous. With so much weirdness on display, it's critical that the artist nail down the more banal details. The counterpoint is the joke, and Yamazaki sells it. There's a fine level of rigor in his renderings of bodies in varying degrees of decay and an equally impressive amount of imagination in the supernatural aspects of the stories. If his facial expressions for the core cast can seem a little flat, that might be part of the joke too; they're of a singularly blase generation, and it takes quite a bit to startle them.

Beyond being the best, most reliable source of dark comedy in manga, Kurosagi is also beautifully produced. I don't know if the covers are actually made of recycled material, but their cardboard-stock feel suggests it, making each volume both handsome and a pretty good joke at the same time. Since the stories are dense with pop-culture and historic references, editor/adapter Carl Gustav Horn's encyclopedic annotations are a wonderful supplement to each chapter.

*****

* Omukae Desu, written and illustrated by Meca Tanaka, CMX, 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1401211165, Aug. 9, 2006, $9.99.
* The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, written by Eiji Otsuka, illustrated by Housui Yamazaki, Dark Horse, 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1593075552, Oct. 11, 2006, $10.95.

*****

David P. Welsh has loved comics since his parents first used Archie and Casper to sedate him during long trips in the family station wagon.

He's worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers, and later sold out for the glamorous world of public relations. Prior to relocating to The Comics Reporter, he wrote his Flipped column for Comic World News for just over three years. He's written articles on comics for print outlets and a variety of other web sites.

He lives in West Virginia, which he says has gotten a lot easier since the Starbucks and Barnes & Noble opened up.

You may e-mail David with questions or commentary You can write to this site about David's columns

Please bookmark his site, Precocious Curmudgeon.

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