Title:
Zombie-Loan (US)
Zonbii Ron (Japan)
Creators:
Authors and Artists: Peach Pit (Banri Sendo and Shibuko Ebara)
Publishers:
- Yen Press (US)
- Square Enix (Japan)
Volumes:
7 volumes
Manga Genres:
- Shonen (Boys') Manga
- Anime Tie-in
- Action / Adventure
- Mystery / Suspense
- Supernatural / Paranormal
Content Rating:
OT – Older Teens, Age 16+
for profanity, dismemberment and bloody fight scenes
More about content ratings
About the Manga:
Zombie-Loan was originally serialized in G-Fantasy magazine, published by Square Enix. An 11-episode animated series based on Zombie-Loan was created by XEBEC M2 and aired on TV Asashi network in Japan in 2007.
About the Authors / Artists:
Peach-Pit is the manga-ka name for two female creators, Banri Sendo and Shibuko Ebara. The name Peach-Pit comes out of their love for the Beverly Hills 90210 TV series, where "The Peach Pit" is the name of the teen's favorite after school hangout.
Sendo and Ebara are childhood friends who met in elementary school. Both artists emerged out of the doujinshi (fan-created comics) scene, and have since gone on to becoming a fan favorite for their series DearS, Rozen Maiden and Shugo Chara!. Many of their series have been adopted into animated TV series, toys and even video games.
Story Summary:
Michiru Kita is a painfully shy and passive girl. Her so-called friends and even her family take advantage of her inability to speak up for herself. But there's one thing they don't know about Michiru: She has a supernatural ability to tell when a person will die just by looking at their necks. A grey ring around the neck means death is near. A darker ring means death is just moments away.
This ability frightens Michiru, so she avoids tapping into her supernatural skill. But one day, she runs into two handsome and mysterious classmates and discovers to her horror that both boys have dark rings around their necks.
Michiru eventually finds out that Shito and Chika have secrets of their own. Both boys have cheated death once, and as a result have incurred a huge debt that they must repay in order to revert from being 'undead' to being fully alive, relatively normal humans again.
How will Shito and Chika repay their debts? By working it off, of course. As freelance shinigami or grim reapers, they're charged with finding flesh-eating zombies and sending them off to the afterlife with their ectoplasm weapons, a gun and a sword that they invoke from their hands.
Shito and Chika recruit Michiru to use her 'shinigami eyes' to find zombie targets. Thus, the adventure begins as this matched threesome embarks on a mission to rid their town of the evil undead and repay their paranormal loans.
Main Characters
Michiru KitaMichiru is a shy and mousy high school girl with a strange supernatural talent: She can tell when someone will die. She discovered this ability when her parents died and she saw the rings around their necks right before their deaths. Traumatized by this experience and depressed at her current sad state of affairs as the class doormat, Michiru wonders why she should even bother staying alive.
Shito Tachibana (Boy A)
Dark-haired and handsome, Shito Tachibana is a class heartthrob who makes the girls swoon with his cool demeanor. Shito, along with his classmate Chika are the only survivors of a recent catastrophic highway accident. The miraculous rescue was heavily reported in the news, where Shito was identified by the anonymous monicker "Boy A" or "A-kun" What people don't know is that Shito actually did die that day, but 'lived' to see another day thanks to a debt he incurred from Z-Loan, a paranormal money/life lender. Shito's zombie-killing weapon is an ectoplasm gun.
Chika Akatsuki (Boy B)
Hot tempered, blunt and unabashedly mercenary, Chika is the fiery pepper to Shito's even-tempered salt. As a survivor of a highway overpass collapse, Chika is known as "Boy B" or "B-kun," a title of secondary status that he resents. Chika's weapon is an ectoplasm sword that materializes out of his hand. He wields his sword to battle with flesh-eating zombies and also uses it to open a gateway to the afterlife to send tormented souls to their final reward.
