By Dustin Cabeal

Someone turns off the power to the containment chamber and now there’s a bunch of ghosts loose in Japan! I wish, but instead we just have a bunch of demon’s that have escaped the bowels of hell and need to be collected and returned to hell. Enter our demon hunter looking for a human host to make himself a better tool for fighting demons!

Then we immediately go to a woman trying to get casted in a leading role by meeting with a creepy producer. Chloe Love introduces herself as TV star with one late night horror show under wings… Ghost Reaper Girl! A high school girl that murders monsters in a swimsuit. Thus begins the running gag of Chloe looking incredibly young and being nearly 30 years old. The producer begins to force himself upon Chloe and I can hear you reader going, “Oh no” and you’d be right but for the wrong reason. A demon pops out of the producer and says, “let me inside your body.” That’s when you should say “Oh no.”

From there we learn that something is special about Chloe’s body and all the demon’s want inside of it. She meets a demon hunter and he’s her number one fan having watched all the episodes of her terrible TV show and has decided to make a pact with her and help her fight demons. They team up and he becomes a cartoon sickle, and they slice a bunch of demons up. Eventually they head back to her home and a gluttonous cat demon shows up and picks a fight until Chloe’s infinite kindness heals the ghost cat that is in the form of a man. Now she has two nice demons that both want to live with her and be inside her body and no there is no other way to say that. Okay, maybe possess her body.

There’s a very old formula being followed here and it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it would fit in an era before we had a #MeToo movement. At times this feels like a step back rather than forward. Every character beside Chloe says, “Let me inside your body.” Not the best message, but then on the other hand the two ghosts in love with her are both respectable and genuinely care about her because she cared about them. The way she heals the cat is with empathy and cutting out his demon possessed soul. She could have killed him and been done with him but having grown up on the streets she understood how hard it was to find your next meal and having to fight for it sometimes. That’s the part that’s great, is Chloe’s rich background story that we’re just barely getting into. It’s just ruined by the pervy stuff or the filler pages of the love triangle hanging out at home.

The cartoon sickle feels terribly out of place in the story but is amazing at the same time. You’d expect this cool sickly, but instead it has giant cartoon eyes and an over-the-top mouth and tongue. It doesn’t make sense to be in the story which doesn’t feel so serious that it needs comic relief, but there it is comic relief in the form of a cartoon sickle. I was hoping the cat would be a similar transformation, but it was silly in a unique way that was also humorous. The tone is not truly clear in this first volume. It has heart, but then it has some ridiculous moments and a lot of problematic elements like the constant body invasion of our main character that can only be seen as attempted rape.

The artwork is actually great. It’s better than you’d expect based on what I’ve described to you. Chloe is enduringly cute even if her design is safe and generic. Meanwhile, the producer had a ton of details and realism to his design. You would have thought that he was going to be sticking around for the bulk of the entire story. The amount of detail on the artwork doesn’t match the dated feel the story often follows. And that cartoon sickle… so perfectly misplaced with the rest of it, but it draws your eye to it every time.

Ghost Reaper Girl is by no means a bad story. It just has some society problems to it and a dated formula that it’s following. That’s the real shame because it has a lot of potential and maybe the second issue abandon’s some themes like rape wrapped up in the euphemism of “body invasion”. I’m curious to see if these problems can be addressed in the next volume or if this is already said and done. It’s hard to recommend it fully, but I also won’t burry it completely either. You may be better deciding for yourself if this book is for you or not.

Akissa Saike
Rika Shirota
Hashimoto
Shu Nagata
Ryota Kasai
Satoshi Watanabe
Daiju Asami
Viz Media

Score: 2/5