The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol 1

“Your body is their business” ”“ is the tagline of the company, rather unassumingly named the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and floated by a bunch of five Buddhist university graduates, corpse-tracker Numata, master-embalmer Makino, Yata, with an alien sock puppet that just knows a lot of things, medium Karatsu and manager/ master-hacker Ao Sasaki. With powers such as these, it’s easy for them to locate and tend to their clientele ”“ the dead who are still trapped in their corpses, and have unfinished tasks to complete before they can move on.

It takes an amount of skill to bring something new to the table in case of team stories, and I have to say while the concept itself is pretty snazzy, it’s what the creators do with it that distinguishes Kurosagi from your run-of-the-mill team story. The title is primarily a horror series, with a bunch of vignettes dealing with different aspects of their work making up the first volume. In the span of 200 pages, we encounter a grisly serial killer, a teen suicide that gives a whole new spin to fatherly love, an old lady’s desire to be taken to a place of rest, and an ingenuous tale of insurance fraud. Character development is kept to a minimum, you can make out that these tales are the hook for a longer saga.

Kurosagi looks different from the manga one normally reads. Dark Horse wisely chose to go with the original cover design by Bunpei Yorifuji, superb iconography in its own right. Yamazaki’s work reminds me of American cult artist Mike Allred ”“ his clean lines amplify the sordidness of the proceedings beautifully. Oh, and did I mention that this series is for adults only? Highly recommended.