There's been a period of my manga-reading journey where I really enjoyed reading all sorts of one-shots and single-volume manga of any kind, since they were able to portray all sorts of stories in such a short amount of pages. It just amazed me. Out of all the oneshots that I read in that period, this one is definetly the best. Let me tell you about it.
The story I'm talking about is Kariki Hajime's one-shot called Liv.
Just judging from the tags alone, you could definetely jump to conclusions and say that Liv is a weird mix and mashup of genres; A romance manga about a zombie apocalypse is not exactly something extremely common, but please, hear me out, will you?
Aoki is a survivor in an apocalyptic world destroyed by a zombie apocalypse. One day, while he's asleep in an abandoned building, he hears the noise of dripping blood, which makes him wake up to a zombie girl watching over him. Quickly, Aoki grabs his weapon and is about to kill the zombie when, suddendly, it speaks: " Ao- ki".
I'm not going to spoil any more than that, since I'd be removing pages from a oneshot that's already short as it is, with it only 55 pages long by itself.
Despite having to tell everything that it needs to tell in such a limited amount of pages, this oneshot does a great job with it comes to story telling. That being said, the world building is a whole another story: the entire world is presented in about two pages which, even though the premise of a zombie apocalypse is a very common trope, is way too short if you ask me.
Liv manages to be really dark in the themes it talks about, while also having its occasional cute and fluffy moments thanks to its reoccurring chibi panels it sprinkles every once in a while.
Liv is definetely a great example of storytelling in my book: I really grew attached to the characters in the story, despite it being so short and the characters being so few in of themselves, and
Another great detail I found only after rereading the manga is
The art is well-made, both in the panels themselves and in the gorgeous cover that sits at the front, and also reminds me of Tsuiraku JK to Haijin Kyoushi's art, another great manga with breath-taking panels and art, which I also recommend you read.
Liv is definetely a great proof of concept of what I hoped to be a full-sized series. Overall, it deserves a fair 8 out of 10 from me.
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