ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a pro-social, class conscious zombie story about a depressed and horribly overworked office worker waking up to a zombie apocalypse and celebrating because it means he doesn’t have to go to work anymore, then setting out to do all the things he’d never gotten to do before the world ended because he was too busy working, before it’s too late. It also criticizes that and he quickly comes around to “oh, this is actually really empty and reckless,” eventually settling on a theme that’s something like “even in a hopeless, doomed world, even in the face of calamity, it’s important to keep living and helping people and finding joy in life where you can.”
It’s not explicitly Marxist, but a later arc in the manga does have a character explicitly say something like “Marx said that capitalism’s contradictions would eventually lead to its destruction, but here the world has ended and capitalists are still [making horrible stratified nightmare systems based on rentseeking and feeding people to zombies] and people just keep going along with it for some reason.” There’s also a pretty early panel showing a broken cityscape with no electricity, filled with shambling corpses, overlaid with dialogue about careers that has the gem “100 years ago no one would have predicted modern careers like drone pilot or cryptocurrency specialist.”
The whole thing is stylish as hell, with decent themes and a tone that walks a line between dry and bitter sarcasm and wide-eyed wonder. It’s a little too soft on the more fucked up places it goes too, but ultimately the main characters are almost pathologically-good-natured civilians trying to survive and lend a helping hand where they can, they’re not hardened revolutionaries out to fight for a better world. The manga also has a lot of little filler scenes that are basically just the cast going to [insert famous tourist destination in Japan] and all but soyfacing and pointing at [thing it’s famous for] before zombies show up and they have to run away. Some pages have multiple of that gag crammed into their panels for a quick montage.
ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead is a pro-social, class conscious zombie story about a depressed and horribly overworked office worker waking up to a zombie apocalypse and celebrating because it means he doesn’t have to go to work anymore, then setting out to do all the things he’d never gotten to do before the world ended because he was too busy working, before it’s too late. It also criticizes that and he quickly comes around to “oh, this is actually really empty and reckless,” eventually settling on a theme that’s something like “even in a hopeless, doomed world, even in the face of calamity, it’s important to keep living and helping people and finding joy in life where you can.”
It’s not explicitly Marxist, but a later arc in the manga does have a character explicitly say something like “Marx said that capitalism’s contradictions would eventually lead to its destruction, but here the world has ended and capitalists are still [making horrible stratified nightmare systems based on rentseeking and feeding people to zombies] and people just keep going along with it for some reason.” There’s also a pretty early panel showing a broken cityscape with no electricity, filled with shambling corpses, overlaid with dialogue about careers that has the gem “100 years ago no one would have predicted modern careers like drone pilot or cryptocurrency specialist.”
The whole thing is stylish as hell, with decent themes and a tone that walks a line between dry and bitter sarcasm and wide-eyed wonder. It’s a little too soft on the more fucked up places it goes too, but ultimately the main characters are almost pathologically-good-natured civilians trying to survive and lend a helping hand where they can, they’re not hardened revolutionaries out to fight for a better world. The manga also has a lot of little filler scenes that are basically just the cast going to [insert famous tourist destination in Japan] and all but soyfacing and pointing at [thing it’s famous for] before zombies show up and they have to run away. Some pages have multiple of that gag crammed into their panels for a quick montage.