Dead Heads

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'A young man who is missing fingers and a girl in a straight jacket. The dead rule, while the living begin to resist!'

Tsutomu Nihei's preoccupation with diseases run rampant, threatening humanity itself, rears its ugly head again in this tragically aborted manga.

Nihei charts the same story from different angles in all his manga, it's always about the end of the world, a disease, and humanity being forced to evolve into something else.

Dead Heads is Nihei doing romantic comedy. Without the comedy. Ok, so it's a romantic chase story set in a world that would make George A. Romero have nightmares. That's right; ... Nihei attempted to make the world's best zombie manga but for whatever reason it was just not to be this time.

This is a damn shame because you just know Nihei and zombies go together like Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The manga author's works are so dour and depressing, so darkly humorous and edgy, they're already populated by zombies anyway, but the idea of Nihei drawing a world of zombies chasing a few humans struggling to survive in a barren wasteland, it’s almost too much to handle.

The end of this sole chapter brims with so much potential; so much expectation from the reader, it's quite painful to know that there is nothing after that page. Hopefully Nihei will re-attempt the zombie genre in the future, not that he hasn't dipped his toes into it already with his previous manga, but we all want to see him confront it head on like a cricket bat into zombie skull.

I find it hard to judge a one shot since you have no grasp of the story nor characters and it almost feels unfair to rate that lower due to them not having any time to be developed let alone barely get established, yet here I am so I'm gonna do the best I can.

Review:

I don't really have any issues to be honest. I'm incredibly interested in this setting and the characters, and if it was given the proper time to grow and be developed I think it could be a really fascinating manga. The art is solid especially for Niheis prior works. It ... has that same gritty haunting feeling, the dead heads look unsettling and would make for a great antagonist.

All in all if you enjoy Niheis work but are looking for more of the Biomega/Abara feeling instead of the Aposimz or Sidonia feel this is for you.

While it may be just a taste ofa bigger world, it was satisfying enough.