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The Spring 2021 Manga Guide
Undead Unluck

What's It About? 

The story follows Fūko Izumo, otherwise known as woman cursed with "Unluck". Fūko brings misfortune to anyone who touches her and the scale is proportional to how long they had physical contact. She's saved by Andy, a man that cannot die ("Undead"). He hopes to figure out a way to use Fūko's misfortune to finally bring him death. The unlikely pair team up to complete missions given to them by the Book of Revelations, but if they or any of the other negators in their union fail, the book can punish humanity.

Undead Unluck is drawn and scripted by Yoshifumi Tozuka and Viz released the paperback and digital versions of its first volume for $9.99 and $6.99 respectively







Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

How funny you find this book depends on two very specific things: the amount of humor you gain from watching a naked undead guy use parts of his body as bullets and how entertaining you find him keeping a girl alive so that he can make her fall for him, have sex with her, and then use her "unluck" ability to die. Yes, Undead Unluck is the sort of horror/comedy blend that stands to be emphatically either “I love it” or “I hate it” for most readers, and I'm afraid that I come down in the latter camp.

The story takes place in a world similar to our own (but much more combustible) where some people have powers that negate various aspects of the natural world. Called, unsurprisingly enough, “Negators,” there's an organization devoted to hunting them down. Union is made up of ten Negators who have vowed to use their powers for the organization's version of good, and seats only open up when one member of the group dies. Since becoming a member of Union is the only viable option for our protagonists Andy and Fuuko to live, they're going to have to kick some Union butt and get seats at the table.

Apart from the fact that Fuuko would really rather not die – despite the book opening with her suicide attempt, because her Unluck power brings misfortune to all who touch her bare skin, which in no way sounds like something out of an American comic book that starts with the letter “x” – the main goal here is to get Fuuko to have strong enough feelings for the Undead half of the title duo that she can slam him with an especially virulent stroke of badness. Because as much as Fuuko would like to not be dead, Andy pretty desperately does. This is entirely because his power is to constantly regenerate from any and all deadly injuries, and after over a hundred years, he's about done. (He has a tattoo of the numbers 1865 on his chest; I'm guessing that's either his serial number from a dastardly experiment or the year of his first death.) Since Fuuko's bad luck is proportional to how much she likes a person and how emotionally charged the action causing that person to touch her skin is, Andy figures that if she falls in love with him and he has sex with her, he'll get slammed with enough badness to finally kill him once and for all.

As you can probably guess, this means a lot of Andy groping Fuuko to generate worse luck. Fuuko is perpetually mid-wail about her situation and it's not particularly comfortable reading, even though it's clearly meant to be funny. That Andy can't seem to keep his pants on is a little more humorous, mostly because of the eternal censorship bar that implies an impressive amount of penis, but also because the black panel is basically just part of his character design. Considering that the rest of his design incorporates grosser imagery, like a sword through his chest and a card through his head, nudity seems the least of all concerns.

From all of this, you should know by now whether or not this nonstop blood-soaked action/horror/comedy is going to tickle your funny bone or not. There's no shame either way – this is just one of those stories where knowing what you're getting into is definitely advised before buying.


Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

Undead Unluck is a story that I absolutely would have dropped after the first two chapters if I read it weekly in Shonen Jump. The opening chapters casually blend suicide with handsy groping for laughs as we watch Fuuko, a woman desperate to die, get caught up in Andy's violent world, an undead man with a perpetual shit-eating grin on his face. Fuuko is cursed with “Unluck”, where anyone who has direct physical contact with her exposed skin is doomed to suffer unfortunate circumstances. Meanwhile Andy is very much tired of his immortality and hopes to use her to cause a disaster so catastrophic there's no way he can come back from it. The volume gradually introduces additional wrinkles in Andy's plan, including an explanation as to why both parties have these powers in the first place, but the story's insistence on framing the main duo's relationship as one that could devolve into assault or even rape at any point took all the fun out the story.

Shonen Jump is having plenty of success with over-the-top violent heroes with exactly zero brain cells right now. You can endear an audience to non-threatening stupidity pretty easily; see Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen for recent success stories. Undead Unluck aims for something similar with Andy, but the attempt fails once sexual violence is on the table. That, and Andy is neither as funny nor as charming as his Shonen Jump peers. He has one (1) stupid face and his constantly censored dick barely measures on the Laugh-O-Meter.

Where I can give Undead Unluck some acknowledgment is the artwork. I might find the primary character designs unattractive, but the action sequences and background work is effective. The wanton destruction is illustrated in loving detail, whether it's a derailed train or skyscrapers collapsing left and right. One secondary character, the “Unavoidable Void” was especially cool in his suped-up armor.

I'm all for goofy humor, but Undead Unluck's mishandling of earlier, heavy topics put it at a disadvantage that I was disinterested in overcoming.


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