Tokyo Summer of the Dead

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OK, so imagine this: I'd just come back from my PE class, it's 16:30. I'm looking for the first volume of 20th Century Boys, a manga I've wanted to read for a while. Alas, I can't find it. Whilst searching for it, I see the first volume of this manga called Tokyo Summer of the Dead, which I'd never heard about before. "Sounds silly", I thought to myself. In the cover, a girl in a sailor fuku with a bloodied pipe. "Hey, maybe it's silly fun!" After considering it for a while, I purchase it and head back home.

Fast forward to 22:25. I've got a ... nasty bite mark on my rear, and it's hurting like hell. My God, was this awful.

Right in the introduction chapter, we see a girl -- in a swimsuit, no less -- getting bitten by a zombie in the most retarded way imaginable. It was at this point that I realised this wasn't going to be pleasant.

The first half of this thing (chapters 01-03) focuses on Yu Someya and Ikuse Minamori. These two are most obviously going to become a couple at some point, and the manga's attempts at creating any doubt over this fact are laughable, at best. Naturally, they get caught up in the ongoing zombie apocalypse in Tokyo. And naturally, they get to play every single zombie apocalypse cliché one can imagine, plus the ever cringe-worthy "I will protect you!" cliché. At no point was I ever invested in their story, nor was I entertained by it. It's composed solely of a sequence of clichés, all of them played by uninteresting characters. At the end of the third chapter, it attempts to make us care by putting our female lead in a "last stand" kind of situation. Needless to say, this attempt failed.

The second half focused on a group of high school girls whose names I don't care to remember. They also played a great number of clichés, but they were also mind-bogglingly stupid, going as far as shopping in the middle of a zombie outbreak. I suppose the author -- one Kugura Shiichi -- thought this was funny. Personally, I thought this was just dumb. To make matters worse, the dialogue was painful to read. As you can imagine, I didn't care about these three either.

At the end of the volume was a short story called "Snapdragon", apparently disconnected from the zombie outbreak. This was just about the only interesting part about this. This story focused on this woman who was being stalked by someone, receiving death threats. It wasn't particularly good, but after the clichéd mess that had come before, it was surprisingly pleasant. At the very least, I cared about what was happening.

So, let's see. As I bought this, I believed it would be silly fun. Well, to call it "silly" is an understatement, since this is completely and absolutely retarded. "Fun" this was not, and I believe I'd rather watch Violence Jack than read the remaining three volumes of this thing. Even now, I cannot believe I bought this crap. The only other "positive" thing about this is the art, which is just all right to look at. Suffice it to say, I never want to read this crap again