4 out of 5

As a GIGANTIC generalization: something manga does – or seems more willing to do – much, much better than American comics is stay true to its initial promise.  Maybe it’s that the artform has all of these in-built genres that, by simply being defined, don’t require justification for their quirks, but I think the DC / Marvel model of interconnected events has soured much of the English-speaking approach to comics.  So you buy into a book because it has a funky premise, and the “promise” is that you’ll get to read about that premise.  But after one or two arcs of that, some kind of secret villain or plotline is introduced, and then critics will celebrated the broad scope of the book, but meanwhile… the promise is dropped.  Those are what I call “hook” books, and… I’m not a fan.

A lot of manga, meanwhile, will offer that hook, but then will totally stick the fuck to it.  Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: five students with (kinda) “abilities” that they consider unemployable ones find that they work together well for transporting the dead to their final, desired locations.  (One of ’em can speak to the dead, you see…)  Sometimes there’s a mystery in determining what that location, but very often there’s been foul play involved in the creation of that corpse, which allows for writer Eiji Ōtsuka to exercise his love of horror when revenge is taken via corpses a’risin’.  And while Ōtsuka has done the task of adding mythology elements, and certainly evolving his core cast as well as adding a small roster of side players, it never fails: each tankobon has a set of corpses that need to be delivered.  Promise fulfilled, with, thankfully, the gob-smacking boon of each of those deliveries being unique, whether they err toward comic or tragic.

The third omnibus collection (of volumes 7 – 9) keeps this trend going strong, even if we do start to go very far afield with the cases, the group having to take odd jobs to supplant the cash their “business” doesn’t make and conveniently stumbling across bodies along the way (Ōtsuka doesn’t avoid lampshading this), but it’s still entertaining as all get-out, with Housai Yamazaki’s once more proving capable of crafting and personality type, and setting, and any horrific scenario and just making it look damned real, within the context of the Kurosagi universe.  It is, admittedly, slightly disappointing that some of the aforementioned myth-building that was frequently featured in Omnibus 2 is somewhat left out here (not forgotten, just not a focus), but I’d again point to the absolute entertainment factor as balancing this out.

Dark Horse once more includes each volume’s annotations by the wonderfully bemusing Carl Gustav Horn.