Maddies Manga

A potentially psychopathic boy finds himself stuck in a love hotel upon the start of a zombie apocalypse.

You can check out volume one of this series for yourself below

What’s this manga about? (Chapter 1 spoilers)

We meet our protagonist as he meets up with a much older women. It’s quickly revealed that they met on a dating app, and that they only have one short-sighted goal for their relationship. They quickly move to a love hotel, where the women takes the opportunity to rob our protagonist for all he’s got while he’s in the shower. He doesn’t have much time to lament over this, as he soon begins hearing screams coming from outside the window.

He tunes into to the news for some more context, and the worst possible thing is revealed—people are going crazy and biting one another out in Shinjuku. After being attacked, the victims then turn into perpetrators themselves, in true zombie fashion. In almost poetic justice, one of the early victims ends up being his earlier date. Before she passes away though, she learns some crucial information about our mysterious protagonist—he was once all over the news as a murder suspect. She quickly decides that she should probably return the money she just stole from him, but is attacked outside the hotel door before she can make it in.

My thoughts

I am so grateful to Pixiv Comics for providing this as a free to read manga this month. As Yen Press only recently released the English version, I was planning on doing a blind buy—I’m very glad that I held off. This was a complex read for me, and while I did download the entirety of the first volume, I stopped just after the first volume. Let me talk about why.

Immortality and Punishment is a very interesting contribution to the zombie subgenre of horror manga, but it’s an overall lacklustre contribution to the horror genre of manga. The protagonist is interesting and mysterious, however he is just lacking something. While he’s portrayed as someone who clearly has a lot of struggles, I don’t believe he is interesting enough to save the story. If he were truly a deranged killer, the entire interaction at the love hotel would have gone differently. Was he perhaps framed? Maybe he took on the persona of a killer because of his getting aroused by death? I really am not all that sure, but again, he’s not interesting enough for me to want to find out.

I understand he is constantly going through the motions of everyday life—he’s only living because he made a promise to someone that he would live to atone for his sins. What sins? Again, unclear. So, now that the zombie apocalypse is happening, will his problems that he was dealing with in the past come up again? As if he didn’t have something to live for before, he certainly wouldn’t right now. Watching such a character—once who has clearly given up on their life, but is living solely due to a promise they made—could make for a fantastic read. Such a complex character should pull you in and make you want to read. Sadly, it just didn’t for me.

The art in this series is also just alright. I hated how the middle aged woman was depicted, but I also disliked how average our protagonist was as well. It almost felt as though the woman was drawn to be a little ugly, because her entire role was to sleep with the protagonist and then die a brutal death. While I understand things like this happen in zombie media, it doesn’t mean I have to like them. The one saving grace for the art in this series was the zombies themselves. This author is incredibly talented at drawing hordes of zombies. The gore was also well drawn, with it being abstract enough to not be disgusting, but not so abstract that I couldn’t understand what was happening.