Schoolgirl Mitsurugi Saya was already having a bad day—unable to focus on classes, with her brother in the hospital—when the zombies attacked! One by one, every boy in school is transformed into ravenous beasts straight out of hell, spreading a terrifying demonic infection! She manages to find her friends Amashika Maria and Momoshiro Momo, and together they fight back...but do they have the strength to take on so many zombie boys?!

Girls Zombie Party has a story by and art by sarako. English translation is done by Matthew Carolan, and lettering by Kai Kyou. Published by Ghost Ship (March 10, 2026). Rated M.

Lucas DeRuyter
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sarako's Girls Zombie Party is a new entry in the subgenre of horny manga that dials up the risqué elements of classic B-movie or pulp media. Other entries in this subgenre include The Island of Giant Insects and High-Rise Invasion. While I can't say that any of the entries in this schlocky storytelling niche are particularly interesting works of fiction, clearly, they do well because people keep making 'em. Girls Zombie Party does not aspire to rise above the standard set by its predecessors, but does understand this mold well and should be fun for most prospective readers in a “bad movie night” kind of way.

The leading trio of Girls Zombie Party consists of the archetypal Mitsurugi Saya, Amashika Maria, and Momoshiro Momo. Saya is a raven-haired, pure-hearted girl motivated principally by her desire to protect her sickly younger brother, Maria is a petite, rich girl tsundere, and Momo is the klutzy comic relief. If you've read any number of manga before reading Girls Zombie Party, chances are you've encountered some version of these characters before, and the only thing that makes them feel distinct here is how hard the work leans into specific fetishizations for each character archetype. Saya adorns the cover of Girls Zombie Party in a skimpy “modern ninja” inspired outfit, Maria parades around in a thong for much of this work, and Momo literally falls into sexual situations on more than one occasion.

All of them spend plenty of time in sexual situations in Girls Zombie Party, as in this specific interpretation of the zombie apocalypse, zombies can release tentacle-like appendages from their bodies that restrain and attempt to infect these girls and other characters. At first, it seems like this zombie virus might be some kind of commentary on sexual promiscuity, as it only affects sexually active men who transform into zombies. However, by the end of the volume, a young man who's insecure about his virginity also transforms into a zombie, so the only deeper themes I could glean from this work are that men are predators and women are both empowered and fetish objects.

Though even if both the narrative and smutty elements of this work didn't do much for me, I can appreciate all the small ways it establishes its pulpy tone. Matthew Carolan's translation really helped me find a way to engage with this work, expressions I'm not sure I've seen before in manga like “when pigs fly” or plainly hilarious declarations like “but you also have honking big tits!” By the end of sarako's Girls Zombie Party, I realized that I really shouldn't be taking it too seriously, which means this is best consumed as horny popcorn media and little else. It's no Let's Make a Harem in a Zombie World!, but few works manage to strike the perfect tone of horniness, self-aware humor, and cultural critique that elevates a work of smut fiction from passable to memorable.

Erica Friedman
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Zombies are such an interesting expression of human fear. Like vampire, we often ascribe to them a hypersexualization, as well as near immortality. Sex and death made manifest in a single form for vampires, and given a viral aspect in zombies. In Zombie Party, three girls, who are themselves viewed with a hypersexual lens by a teacher, as well as fellow students, find themselves fighting all the males at their school who have been transformed into rapacious zombies.

The interesting fact here is that those same males started out the story as violent, with fantasies of raping these girls to dominate them, then turned into zombies who could do so. Our protagonists fight back with sword and bat, until they are joined by a housewife with a gun. Of course zombies can't just be killed easily, so we can look forward to more volumes of staring up girls' skirts, watching them penetrated by zombie tentacles and still have to deal with their brutish teacher. It's a bonanza of porn tropes, but with no “good guys” readers will have to choose to root for the women slaughtering the men, or the rapey zombies in this volume. The next volume is likely to involve incest as well, for fans of lazy lusting.

I applaud Girls Zombie Party for attempting a minimum threshold of story, but points off for just being wholly grim in execution. Nothing in this book feels healthy or fun. The zombie plot might end up having an explanation, but how this perspective of even fictitious girls is seen as entertaining will never be explicable to me. By the end of this volume one, I did, finally, see the value of zombie shooters—killing the zombie-brained would be cathartic.

Bolts
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I won't beat around the bush. This one was pretty boring. There's always one title that tries to bring back zombie apocalypse stories, sometimes thinking that adding a lot of sex appeal will end up making things feel fresh, even though that idea has been done to death for well over a decade now. You really can't play the genre straight anymore without bringing something unique to the table, and unfortunately, Girl Zombie Party really doesn't do that. Don't let the cover art fool you; while there are one or two bad ass moments here, it feels incredibly hollow and emotionally unsatisfying.

The story feels like it was trying desperately not to copy the homework of Highschool of the Dead beat for beat. At least Highschool of the Dead relished in itself a little bit more than this story did. The only thing noticeably distinct about this story is the way that the zombies themselves are presented. They're not like typical zombies, where they need to bite somebody in order to infect them, but rather it comes off more like a tentacle parasite that enters the body. Of course, it needs to enter the body through either the genitals or through the mouth, so there are definitely a lot of panels that lean into tentacle fetishes, but the story never really goes that far with the idea for it to be titillating to those who are into that sort of stuff. It's such a shallow idea to distinguish this from other zombie stories because when you remove that, it's just a bad power fantasy where the girls run around in their underwear.

The action is incredibly one-note and borderline confusing at times, characters show up like they're clocking in for work, and I thought there was gonna be a satisfying buildup to some characters being set up at the beginning of the story, only for the end of this volume to show that I was given this way more credit than I think it deserved. Then the story tries to get me to care by introducing some dramatic plot points, like a young brother who is sick and needs to be found, but considering I didn't care about the characters that I was actually watching, I wasn't really all that interested in trying to find a character who never makes an appearance here. As porn, it's very unsatisfying, and as a zombie story is as basic as they come.