Manga Titles To Check Out If You Like Zombies:
(Or manga titles featuring zombies that DOESN’T include Highschool of the Dead)
Sawanabe Zombie
Publisher: Star Fruits Books
Creator: Kakio Tsurukawa
Translation: Dan Luffey
Lettering: Kelly Ngo
Availability: Digital only. Read on Azuki!
Ongoing or Completed: Completed. (One shot)
“With a quick note on the first page of “ This manga contains violent and grotesque imagery”, Sawanabe Zombie opens to its protagonist:college student Sawanabe who finally gets bit. He is rightfully distraught as he’s spent six months surviving the zombie apocalypse and he lays on a floor bemoaning his fate. Yet…when he awakens, he finds that he still has some consciousness? The actual zombie transformation physically has turned Sawanabe into a zombie with obvious zombie urges like hunger but he can still function with some humanity that he demonstrates when he saves a human woman from being eaten.
As a one-shot Sawanabe Zombie moves from the present day for our protagonist and the flashbacks of when the zombie apocalypse popped off and when his life changed forever. Sawanabe was just an ordinary college student enjoying life and now he’s fighting for survival balancing his morality with his craving for human flesh. This one shot is also wickedly funny when Sawanabe questions his iffy moral code after becoming a zombie via a few pages that will make readers chuckle. I love the way this one-shot ends in a blaze of grotesque and gory revenge. I also love the closure for Sawanabe as he looks back on how the world has changed and how he now realizes his true heart’s desire to pursue, in his new life as a zombie.
P.S. The mangaka is on Twitter (X) and has posted about another ongoing manga series in the works about “Two siblings are roaming a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by a zombie epidemic 10 years ago. For some reason these two kids aren’t getting attacked by the zombies” that I would love to see licensed and released with an English language translation.
Recommended for fans of: shorter bursts of manga via one shots, manga of the Seinen genre, philosophical manga stories with wicked humor
Zombie Cherry
Publisher: Akita Publishing Co.,Ltd.
Creator: Shoko Conami
Translation: Mona Hietala/ MOMOSUKE INC.
Availability: Digital only. Also available on Manga Plaza.
Ongoing or Completed: Completed. 3 volumes
Miu is an occult fanatic (her speciality is Japanese horror), who guzzled down a whole bottle of “Cherry Soup”, a super strong cell revitalization liquid without thinking. Created by her childhood best friend Haru, he was experimenting to make a cure for all fatigue and sickness. He hadn’t expected Miu to guzzle it all down to prepare for a date with her crush, Tohno. Thanks to that, now she’s a member of the undead. However, Tohno can’t stomach zombies and Miu is prepared to hide the news of her latest transformation from everyone, especially the guy she’s been crushing on. I still like to look back and reread Zombie Cherry even though it was shorter than I wanted it to be and I wasn’t completely satisfied with how the story’s pacing in the final volume.
Zombie Cherry is just an incredibly funny read and it plays up all several manga tropes (school bullies, misunderstandings galore, love triangles, etc) with a big shojo vibes. The series does a great job in balancing the comedic bits–like the BL jokes with the serious–Mui is just a highschool girl who realizes that her time is limited–with her friends, her family and her crush. The scenes where she loses a limb or body part (like when she re-attaches a finger–the wrong way) have no business being written and illustrated so hilariously.
I think what I like best from rereading Zombie Cherry is the way Mui impacted the lives of others as a teenage girl who turned into a zombie. She ended up forcing some maturity (and much needed character depth) into those around her as they worked together to protect her and ultimately do their best to save her life. I love the energy of this series, the humor that colors this series (all the occult references, jokes and set pieces!) and lastly Mui herself comes to realize how precious life is, the people she loves and how she should treasure herself more! Big shout-out to the mangaka Shoko Conami who put the series on hiatus due to her severe health issues and came back to give the series a conclusion!
Recommended for fans of: romantic comedies, shorter manga series, school life
Zo Zo Zombie
Publisher: Yen Press
Creator: Yasunari Nagatoshi
Translation: Alexandra McCullough-Gracia
Lettering: Bianca Pistillo
Availability: Print and Digital
Ongoing or Completed: Completed, 11 volumes
Isamu is your average fifth grader in Japan, he was told that weird things were popping off at his favorite park. He ignores all the warnings and concerns of weirdos and zombies to find…Zombie Boy! Some zombified kid who isn’t your average kid and soon becomes Isamu’s best friend. The adventures of two new friends with one being a zombie begin in the first volume and Zombie Boy constantly brings surprises and mayhem everywhere he goes. While being undead may not seem like an ideal lifestyle at first, Isamu is constantly amazed by what his newest bestie is capable of. There’s never a boring day with a zombie on the loose and the manga is full of comedy, gags galore, lots of everyday occurrences like entering a manga magazine contest or exercising made way more fun.
So here’s the thing: Zo Zo Zombie, as a series, is a great example of gag manga and leans into the genre heavily. The manga is very, very silly and very, very gross. Sold as an all ages manga, there are some spots of nudity and a lot of slapstick humor that make it a riotous, hilarious read. The mangaka plays up the titular character using his organs as tools in whatever quest he and Isamu are on: like using his heart and liver as placeholders to save their seats in a movie theater or inflating his intestines and turning them into a boat to travel. In one chapter, in his excitement Zombie Boy opens up his mouth and his excited words materialize into physical objects that bounce around the town, breaking things and creating chaos.
Zo Zo Zombie chronicles the adventures of the bizarre Zombie Boy as he tries to do some good in the world with his best friend Isamu. The inclusion of the four panel 4-koma comics help make the manga more special and more fun–bonus undead content!. An author note from the creator Yasunari Nagatoshi at the beginning of volume one shares that he finally fulfilled his dream of writing Zo Zo Zombie into publication after fourteen years. This sounds like a dream fulfilled and an inspiration to anyone who has a weird little idea that they’ve been kicking around for a while, not sure if the world needs to bear witness to the next weird and wacky, funny thing.
Recommended for fans of: anime tie-ins, all ages manga series, comedic and lovable characters
The Walking Cat: A Cat’s-Eye View of the Zombie Apocalypse
Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment
Creator: Tomo Kitaoka
Translation: Caleb D. Cook
Adaptation: Peter Adrian Behravesh
Lettering and Retouch: JM Iitomi Crandall
Availability: Print and Digital
Ongoing or Completed: Completed, one omnibus
You guessed it, zombies roam what we know of the Earth and civilization has fallen.
This manga starts with Jin, a young man trying to survive the chaos, and be reunited with his wife with whom he was separated from. He foolhardily rescues a cat from a bunch of hungry undead and the unlikely duo sets off on a quest to find a mysterious island where Jin’s wife may yet be alive. It is a zombie story with a twist with a point of view that we don’t always see, if ever in this genre. The artwork here does not shy away from being gory with different zombies in different forms of decay. The mangaka plays up suspense and fright appropriately from the first chapter in, with the attention to detail and playing up light and darkness in the art.
At almost six hundred pages, The Walking Cat: A Cat’s-Eye View of the Zombie Apocalypse is sold as “A survival horror tale about a cat’s journey after society collapses.” What I love about this manga is the many cat ownership changes of said cat: we get to see all of his owners, their hopes, their loved ones and the trials and triumphs they face. Even if some of the later chapters get a little messy on the narrative side and the cat gets closer and farther away from where his original destination was. I think the manga is worth reading for the cat alone: his personality, the funny misshapes he gets into, the sweet but sad origin story of how he received his name–all make this one worth checking out because of its unique premise: of a fearless feline whose curiosity may kill him yet.
P.S. The mangaka is on Twitter (X) and has posted various animated creations inspired and of the manga like so.
Recommended for fans of: slice of life, cats, horror, revolving cast of characters
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Carrie McClain is an Californian native who navigates the world as writer, editor, and media scholar who firmly believes that we can and we should critique the media we consume. She once aided Cindi Mayweather in avoiding capture. See more of her on Twitter (X) and other places she can be found online.
