Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Volume 3 Contains Good Starting Point Stories

Due out tomorrow, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Book Three Omnibus contains a few stories that make for great starting points as it continues the omnibus collected series. This book reprints volumes 7-9 of the gruesome (but insightful) manga series written by Eiji Otsuka and drawn by Housui Yamasaki.

Volume 8, in particular, puts the crew into a school recruitment drive, which means new (or forgetful) readers, along with the fictional potential new members, get reminders of who’s who in the group. The other stories in the book cover important life changes, with both a wedding service for corpses and a nurse handling dead babies.

Volume 7, on the other hand, has the buzzword-heavy zombie video game robot, as well as meditations on the dangers of fame. One story features a plastic surgery clinic that promises you the body parts of a well-known movie star, while another has one of the team doing makeup special effects on a film location.

Volume 9 returns to the theme, with an idol star worried about an obsessed fan and a creepy doll. There’s also a good deal of fan service, when a guy gets the ability to turn invisible and begins spying on women’s locker room, as well as more background on some of the recurring characters.

I like the series, in spite of my distaste for horror, because of the detailed art, the unusual premise — a variety of students with supernatural skills regarding the dead — the clever concepts blending science fiction and the spirit world, and the “getting what’s coming to them” endings for most of the stories. There’s also a good deal of dark humor. If you want to preorder from Amazon, they’ll start shipping the third Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus on March 8.