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I just went on a small anime watching rampage and watched all 11 episodes of Zombie Loan! I hadn’t heard about it at all before just randomly seeing a short summary blurb about it on narutofan.com, but it sounded like it might be interesting, and then I saw that it was made by Peach-Pit, the two-woman mangaka team that makes the awesome Shugo Chara! And I wasn’t disappointed, Zombie Loan was super entertaining and definitely worth checking out. It is about these two guys who were “killed” in a bus accident but the kinda mysterious Ferryman (get it, the mythical ferryman who takes you across the river to the afterlife) made a deal with them to return them to life if they work for him and pay off the debt, but in the meantime they’ll have to deal with being zombies. Plus, Ferryman accidentally switched their arms so there are weird conditions where they have to switch hands to fight with their zombified weapons, and stay within a close distance so their hands don’t rot. But the guys have a hard time finding the zombies they are supposed to be bounty-hunting for Ferryman, since zombies sometimes look like normal people, until they meet this girl that can see a black ring around people’s necks when they are close to dying or dead. At the beginning of the anime series, Michiru is a shy, timid girl who gets bossed around by her friends, but she gets better and isn’t such a wimp after nearly dying, getting pulled into trouble and fights by the two guys, etc. There are a bunch of different characters that work for Ferryman too, some of them are regulars and some of them join in for just a few episodes towards the end- but most of them are varying levels of weird. Like the narcoleptic green-haired girl (see below) who has a cheerful bubbly personality, except when her dark alter-ego comes out and she molests Michiru and/or beats up lots of bad guys before falling asleep again. And there is a guy that is obsessed with eating weird things, and the Soul Reaper that is usually big and scary but near the end loses his core and becomes this mini-chibi-cutesy thing that Michiru carries around like a grumpy pet (HAHA).

I liked how the individual episodes of Zombie Loan weren’t just all side stories of hunting down a particular zombie o’ the week- the episodes felt like they were in order and the characters and overall plot were developed as the show went on. Zombie Loan was really fun to watch because it was pretty funny, plus it felt fresh and unpredictable enough to keep being interesting. At first it seemed like the two guys were the good-friends, partners in crime type who know each other really well and are funny because they tease each other. Then in a few episodes Michiru learns that they actually don’t really get along, and they don’t know each other as well as it first seems. I think they must be doing a second season (this is from 2007), I don’t know why they wouldn’t, since the season builds up a bigger overall back story of a secret organization that for some reason is making illegal zombies, and near the end of the series we get a glimpse of another secret group that governs and regulates the zombies etc. but it seems like they left us hanging and there is a lot more story they could tell.

Manga vol. 1
Manga vol. 2