BODY: Three little girls from a Tokyo shitamachi neighborhood smear on some zombie makeup, scare the shyest girl in manga, and declare the disguise a success. Then an actual zombie walks in.
That's the gag at the center of "side Mitsuboshi Colors," the fourth installment in the triple-collaboration manga that author Katsuwo has been drawing to mark the TV anime adaptation of "#Zombie Sagashitemasu" (abbreviated by fans as "Zonmasu"). It went live on October 10 β World Zombie Day β on the anime's official channels.
The short features Yui, Sat-chan and Kotoha, the self-styled detective trio of "Mitsuboshi Colors," showing off homemade zombie getups. Hitori Bocchi, the panic-prone heroine of "Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu," wanders in, promptly activates her legendary social anxiety and bolts β which the Colors read as proof their costumes are terrifying. Their confidence lasts until Zonko, from "#Zombie Sagashitemasu" itself, turns up.
The crossover project was announced in July and has been rolling out roughly monthly. The second entry was told from the zombie side as "side #Zombie Sagashitemasu," while September's third chapter put Nako from "Hitoribocchi" on the receiving end of a zombie attack. The anime itself has been airing since October 3, with Kyori Nemoto leading a cast that includes Lynn, Kis-My-Ft2's Toshiya Miyata, Hibiku Yamamura, Yuzuka Nukui and Yoko Hikasa.
The insider take
What makes this crossover frictionless is something Japanese readers take for granted: all three series are Katsuwo's, and all three ran in KADOKAWA's Dengeki Daioh family of magazines, so there's no licensing thicket to clear β just one artist drawing their own characters. The more interesting wrinkle is tonal. Katsuwo built a reputation on featherweight slice-of-life comedy about small girls doing small things, and "Zonmasu" β a story about a daughter searching a zombie-overrun Japan for her father, whose promotional trailer opened with her vowing to kill him herself β is a hard swerve. Pairing it with the Colors and Bocchi is both a nostalgia play for the 2018β2019 anime audience and a sly reassurance that the cute-girls DNA survived the apocalypse.
Originally reported by γ³γγγ―γγΏγͺγΌ - ζζ°γγ₯γΌγΉ (Japanese).