REVIEW: ‘Undead Messiah, Vol. 3’

In Undead Messiah three events, seemingly unconnected at first, lead up to an impending zombie apocalypse. A pregnant woman is pursued by a supernatural creature. A 15-year-old boy, Tim Muley, makes a horrific discovery in his neighbor’s garden. Meanwhile, viral videos of a bandaged man, some call Messiah, performing miracles appear on the internet.

Undead Messiah is a supernatural horror-thriller manga written and illustrated by Gin Zarbo and published through Tokyopop. Undead Messiah follows Tim an ordinary teenager obsessed with zombies and knows exactly what he’d do in the event of a zombie apocalypse breakout. Unfortunately for Tim, that now becomes a reality.

When an outbreak of living corpses takes over his town, Tim finds himself in the middle of a living dead conspiracy. Ritch, the internet’s so-called “messiah”, captures and experiments on him. However, just as Tim’s body reacts to the virus and reveals zombie-like symptoms, he must uncover Ritch’s real intentions, and reveal the truth behind the undead’s origins to the world before it’s too late.

The artwork on the cover made me skeptical at first. However, as I progressed through the volume the art gets more detailed and overall is great, The mangaka Gin Zarbo doesn’t hold back with any of the gruesome and horrific details of the zombies. In addition, some of my favorite panels are the ones that feature fight and action scenes.

Something else I found interesting right away about this manga is that this doesn’t originate in Japan. The mangaka of the series is from Switzerland and the manga was originally translated from Switz-German. It’s great to see more and more manga being created from all over the world. I especially liked the mangaka’s decision to use Switzerland as the location to tell the story too. It was a nice change of pace to read manga from a creator outside of Japan. 

The mangaka does a fantastic job of crafting an interesting and thrilling story that keeps readers eager to know what will happen next. Additionally, I liked how Zarbo explores the ethics of immortality and death during a zombie apocalypse. For example, one of the main plot points of the series is that Ritch, the antagonist, is able to heal or even grant people superhuman abilities and even eternal life with his experiments.

Unfortunately, these experiments come at a high cost. People slowly lose all of their human emotions as a side effect. No longer able to feel any form of emotion. Love, anger, not even sadness or grief for the loss of a loved one. In a way becoming their own kind of zombie. I liked how Zarbo’s use of immortality begs the questions: are we human without our emotions or what is the point of living without feelings.

Lastly, I’m sad to say I was a bit disappointed with the final battle. While it started off very promising and full of action ends on an anti-climatic note. I was a little disappointed in how the villain meets their demise. It’s not the worst way for the series to finish off the villain, but it just felt out of character for the character and rushed.

Overall, Undead Messiah, Volume 3 is a fantastic horror manga that fans of the zombie apocalypse genre will really enjoy. Gin Zarbo’s amazing art skills help to tell a great thriller with eye-catching action scenes.  Granted the final battle towards the end of the end falls a little flat, but I will say the manga overall is still worth the read.

Undead Messiah is available from booksellers now. Learn more at Tokoypop.com.