Book Review: Zombie Powder by Tite Kubo

Title: Zombie Powder: The Man With the Black Hand volume 1

Author: Tite Kubo

Source: Wherever Nina got it from

Length: 208 pages

Published: September 5th 2006

Publisher: Viz Media LLC

Warnings: Violence

Other notes: You may (or may not) know Tite Kubo as the man who wrote (then RUINED!!!!) Bleach. It seems to me that several characters from Zombie Powder have been recycled into Bleach like Gamma into Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez.

Spoiler Is Needed To Explain Plot.

Summary from Goodreads: They say that if you find all twelve rings of the dead, you can obtain the power of immortality for the living, or bring back someone from the dead. People who search for the rings are called Powder Hunters, and Gamma is one of them, searching for the power of immortality.

Review: S-0 criminal Gamma is a powder hunter, one who seeks the rings of the dead to obtain zombie powder which will grant him immortality or the power to bring back someone from the dead. So, it had a good start. Gamma arrives by train in wild west looking town in a rather spectacular fashion (the kind of "woah, look at that weird guy with his badass clothes and massive weapon" kind of spectacular), and the gets his clothes stuck in the train. And the hilarity continues. The mighty Gamma gets stabbed with a fork while eating some food, and then gets his wallet stolen by Elwood, a teenager who has joined a local gang to earn money to help is sickly older sister. Then Elwood gets caught and takes Gamma to eat at his house because he ruined his meal and then other gang members see Elwood taking Gamma to his house and they think that Elwood is trying to keep the bounty on Gamma's head all to himself. This leads to the whole gang bursting into Elwood's house and a bunch of crazy stuff happening which results in *SPOILER* Elwood's sister dying. (Sorry! It's a major part of the plot, it can't really be avoided) *SPOILER* . So Elwood decides to join Gamma on his quest to find the zombie rings so he can bring back his sister.

I quite like the characters. They're rather simplistic, and are drawn in a quite "roughish" style. Ranewater Calder and C. T. Smith who show up quite late in the volume. They're enigmatic characters and are very different to the rest of the characters who are mainly wild west styled. First of all, let's start with C. T. Smith. He looks like a London banker, he sings (or hums or something like that) while he kills, he's apparently ambidextrous and he pretended to work for the antagonists and the got Gamma and Elwood out of the gang jail. Yay! He makes a good contrast to Gamma who is too badass to do anything interesting other than show off his strength. Ranewater is the leader of the Ash Daughter bandits and looks like a little girl but is actually an old man. I thought it was a typo when they referred to him as male until Smith actually called him an old man. Calder takes some sort of drug to keep him young. With his hair down, he looks quite a bit older.

It's quite easy to see why, in terms of plot, this series got cancelled. It's rather repetitive as people want to to attack Gamma, but they attack Elwood because they think Elwood is his

weakness and then Gamma completely annihilates them. You never really get enough time to hate (or like) gang members because they die too quickly. Perhaps it's too early to really say that the plot is bad when the volume was only a few chapters long.

Rating: 2 I'm hoping that things will be better next volume.