Although I am delighted to host monthly Anime & Manga Club meetings at the Voorhees branch of our fair library system, I'm really a fan of either format. I watch, and I have tried to read manga, but they're just not really my thing.
So imagine my delight when I found My Dead Girlfriend, a manga-style regular comic of the kind I so love: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, but with a shocking twist: she's dead!
Our hero, Finney Bleak, is the youngest member of a family whose sole claim to fame is that every member dies in a spectacularly grim fashion. There are deaths by cutlass & shark bite, sausage grinder, head injury, and electrocution. Finney, an outcast at his high school for freaks (he's normal, you see), feels like he's got nothing to look forward to but a memorably gruesome death. And then he meets Jenny. They spend a perfect day together at the carnival, agree to meet up later, and then she stands him up. Heartbroken, Finney obsesses, longs for, and eventually meets up with an undead Jenny at the end of the book (I'm not giving away the best parts, don't worry).
Written & illustrated by Eric Wight, whose style you may recognize if you were an O.C. watcher (he drew Seth Cohen's Atomic County comics for the show), this first volume in a promising series is funny, bittersweet, and compulsively readable. I can't wait for the next volumes, which I'll be ordering for the Voorhees branch as they are released.