Anticipating the end of Fullmetal Alchemist, I have been looking for a new manga series that I can follow with similar enthusiasm. This is my latest try.

While Kurosagi does not yet have the deeper themes apparent that Alchemist does, it is an original storyline and I could see literary/life themes developing along with the characters and the plot. Additionally, Housui Yamazaki's [illustration] style is expressive and a bit kinetic, not to mention just plain fun to look at.

Kurosagi includes more discussion at the end than other manga I've read, including a dictionary of onomatapeoic words used in this volume, and an explanation of how the complicated Japanese writing system developed from ancient kanji. That alone is worth the price of admission! ( )

A book-length adventure has the Scooby team accidentally picking up the body of an executed convict and getting pulled into a swirl of the ramifications of homicide, with a look at the surviving families of the victims as well as the ostracized families of the murderers. The mix-up also puts the group at odds with a funeral home with an ominous way of doing business.

There's a lot going on, and the author takes some shortcuts with some pretty outrageous coincidences to make it all come together in a big, bloody confrontation, but I didn't mind since I'm still having fun learning about the characters.

I have the next volume on hand, so onward! ( )

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery service is a very interesting manga to describe, in terms of being a horror manga that contains elements of the supernatural, but is ultimately bases its horror out of what people do to each other, then it does with the actions of the restless dead - though those elements are there.

This volume takes things up another notch with the introduction of Nire Ceremony, a sort of opposite number to the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery service. While the gents of Kurosagi will help the dead with their last wishes for a reasonable fee, Nire Ceremony gives the families of murder victims presumed closure... by chaining the naked corpses of executed murderers to a wall, animating them, and then letting the families desecrate the bodies.

What makes this really work is how the story handles the situation. Nire Ceremony is clearly depicted as being sinister - but they're providing a service to people who have been wronged, and feel that even with the death of the person they wronged them, they still don't have the closure that they deserve. However, on the other hand, the story also depicts this as the final indignity to the families of these people, who committed no crimes on their own, but have been tarred with the same brush by society - societally ostracized for being related to a criminal, and because of this being unable to claim the body of their loved one for a proper funeral, thus allowing Nire Ceremony to provide a venue for the family to desecrate them.

If Japanese society's treatment of the families of criminals is even half as bad as its depicted in this book, then this makes for a great piece of social commentary, and I'd love to see more of this from manga creators in the future. ( )

Little torn. A little longer story arch than it seems we've seen in the series. The artwork is great, again reminding me of those great EC comics. The ending for this volume seems a little fuzzy, ending with a variation on the theme of revenge that was present in the first volume. The manga seems to acknowledge the type of "justice" where victims of an murder get to confront/attack their murderer and what can living family members choose to do with a killer. Comes across a bit odd. Still enough good stuff that I'm going to keep reading the series..

This is a great and original manga that delves into territory that is often untouched upon in comics. ( )