Manga - Reviews of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus 1 and One-Punch Man, Vols. 1 and 2 - a podcast by Stergios Botzakis & Derek Royal

For the September episode of the manga series, Shea and Derek discuss two very different titles, although both heavily invested in popular genres. They begin with Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki's The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Ominibus 1 (Dark Horse Books), a different take on both horror and detective narratives. Although the English-language releases of this title began in 2006, Dark Horse has just this month published the first of the omnibus editions, one that collects the first three volumes of the series. The guys begin by describing the premise as a cross between supernatural horror and Scooby-Doo, where you have a bunch of young investigators, each with a particular set of skills informing their unique form of "detecting." (Derek also compares Otsuka's storylines to The Rockford Files, another series featuring an unlikely investigator constantly down on his luck.) Both enjoy the title well enough, although Shea is less impressed than is Derek, feeling that the routine becomes formulaic rather quickly and that the individual characters are never fully realized, at least in the segments featured in this initial omnibus edition. Next, the Two Guys turn to the first two volumes of One-Punch Man, a satiric series by the pseudonymous One with art by Yusuke Murata (VIZ Media). This began as a webcomic by One in 2009, but then Murata helped to remake the series a few years later, and VIZ Media's recent release of volumes 1 and 2 are the first print versions in English (although originally serialized in the digital Weekly Shonen Jump magazine). Both of the guys love One and Murata's humorous spin on the superhero and shonen formulas, although Derek wonders if the premise may soon wear thin (an inverse of what the guys felt about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service). However, it is Murata's art that solidly captures the guys' attention. As a result, both Shea and Derek are interested in seeing how this series develops, especially if it continues to bring the keen genre-deconstructing insights found in the first two volumes.

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