The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vol. 14

I know I’ve said this before, but when you’ve got a series whose storytelling is more episodic than serialized the wait between volumes doesn’t sting as much.  Granted, I’d love for this series to be more popular so we could get caught up to the Japanese release (and get the spinoffs as well).  This isn’t going to be the volume to do that as it tells three stories involving our favorite unemployable Buddhist college graduates who make their living fulfilling the tasks of the dead.  The first and third stories involve the crew taking on two very different styles of government corruption — some good ol’ misappropriation of funds and a lucrative but dubiously-backed construction project.  Nothing special in terms of the basic stories, but they do involve Kurosagi’s evil doppleganger, web-based urban legends, a phone that can see the thoughts of the dead, old-and-new-school execution devices, and a form of distributed computing that’s ahead *rimshot* of other examples of its type.  They’re still well-constructed and host to Carl Horn’s always entertaining localization.  I guess my main issue here is that they’re just not on par with the title’s best efforts — take it as a sign that run-of-the-mill “Kurosagi” is still plenty entertaining.

Then there’s the matter of the story in the middle which is a dramatic stylistic and narrative departure for the title.  Essentially it’s “Kurosagi” re-imagined as an animated American-style police procedural.  Artist Housui Yamazaki changes up his style to one that borrows affectionately and effectively from the likes of Bruce Timm while writer Eiji Otsuka shows us what the cast would be like if they hailed from the States instead of the Land of the Rising Sun. Pete Tanaka (Karatsu), Jose Donoso (Numata), and Linus Brautigan/Mr. Blanket (Yata/Kerellis) are all pizza deliverymen who are recruited through decidedly unconventional means by one Yoyogi Cohen (Sasaki) and her associate Diana (Makino) to help the FBI with identifying unidentifiable corpses.  Their introductory job:  Find out who has been stealing skin from random corpses in L.A.

In the footnotes to this volume, Horn states that he’s of the opinion that this story represents Otsuka’s thoughts on what an Americanized version of “Kurosagi” would be like.  Given that Dark Horse has been developing this series for film (veeeeeeeerrrrrrryyyyyyy slooooooowlyyyyyyy) I’m undecided as to whether they should take this as a compliment or not.  On one hand, the basic structure of the series is intact and the story itself wasn’t bad — liked the reference to “MPD Psycho” that was worked in there.  The execution does feel a bit simple and forced in a way the regular series usually isn’t.  As a pilot for a series, I can see this winding up on the likes of TNT or Syfy rather than a major network.  It’s an interesting stylistic diversion, memorable mainly for how different it is than its actual quality.  Longtime readers will be glad this volume exists, and as for anyone else who thinks that any of this sounds remotely intriguing you’re encouraged to pick up the omnibus edition of the first three volumes which will be out in another week or two (plug over).