Review: RIP and Haunted House

Haunted House
By Mitsukazu Mihara
Rated OT for Older Teens, age 16+
Tokyopop, $9.99

R.I.P. Requiem in Phonybrian
By Mitsukazu Mihara
Rated OT for Older Teens, age 16+
Tokyopop, $9.99

Tokyopop seems to be on a Mitsukazu Mihara binge at the moment. In August they released volume 1 of The Embalmer, September brought R.I.P. Requiem in Phonybrian, and the October release is the comedy Haunted House. These last two are one-shots that show off Mihara’s signature goth-loli style and her knack for quirky stories.

R.I.P. features Transylvanian Rose, a bratty angel who gets bored with scrubbing the Pearly Gates and decides to go slumming on earth. She takes the soul of Brian, a suicidal undertaker, as a pet, giving him one of her wings to trap them both in the earthly plane. Then she goes about the business of purifying souls so they can pass on to the afterlife. Brian is a reluctant participant, and it’s a running gag that he keeps trying to kill himself to get away from Rose—but he can’t, because he’s already dead. Each of the people they help has a small story to tell, and in the end, there is a bigger story involving Brian. The plot is a slender thing, confected mainly as an excuse to show off Mihara’s exquisitely detailed creations. But Mihara is more than just a designer, she’s an artist with a grasp of composition and space, and she balances the detailed, frilly costumes with large areas of empty space, so that the page never feels crowded or chaotic.

Haunted House is Mihara’s take on The Addams Family, with a hapless young man named Sabato Obiga playing straight man to a ghoulish family dedicated to resurrecting every horror-movie cliché ever. Mihara brings style and some fresh humor to this well-worn genre, but in the end she can’t avoid telling the same story over and over again: Hapless Sabato gets tripped up by his crazy family. Still, it’s fun to watch the family devise new ways to torture him: greeting his new girlfriend with knives and dead animals, putting corpse makeup on his face as he sleeps, showing up at his school dressed like… themselves.

Neither of these books will make you cry or keep you on the edge of your chair, but they’re worth buying for the visuals alone. Mihara is more than just a fashion artist; she really brings her characters to life and has a lot of fun doing it.

Tokyopop also demonstrates with both of these books that they can put together a decent package for ten bucks. There are no color plates or extras, but both books have attractive covers printed with a nice matte finish. The paper quality is not great but good enough to handle Mihara’s details and tones, although the large areas of solid black fade a bit.

This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher.