By Meca Tanaka
CMX, 192 pp.

Eighteen-year-old Madoka Tsutsumi, the protagonist of Omukae desu, suffers from a full-blown case of “I see dead people.” When he isn’t cramming for his university entrance exams, Madoka puts his sixth sense to work for the G.S.G., a mysterious agency that ferries the recently departed from the physical world to the afterlife. Madoka’s skills as a G.S.G. agent are in high demand: not only does he see and talk to dead people, he can temporarily loan them his body so that they can resolve their unfinished earthly business. Sounds like fertile grounds for an angst-ridden shojo manga, but Meca Tanaka plays this set-up for laughs. When we first meet Madoka’s boss Nabeshima, for example, he’s wearing an ugly, ill-fitting bunny suit that’s supposed to put ghosts at ease when G.S.G. agents come calling. The suit doesn’t work. Nabeshima’s first “client” furiously resists, engaging the bunny-suited agent in a judo-style smack down.

Sometimes these kind of visual gags work, and the material is sublimely silly. I particularly enjoyed the first story, in which an ornery old man refuses to cross over until he has a chance to meet his soon-to-be-born grandchild. While Subaru Sumeragi would engage in a profound, circle-of-life conversation with said ghost before exorcizing him, Madoka allows his former neighbor to inhabit his body, visit the maternity ward, and hector his son-in-law before motorcycling off to the afterlife.

But too often the jokes feel forced. Panel after panel are bursting with sound effects, thought balloons, and heavy-handed editorializing from Tanaka just to make sure we’re in on the joke. As a result, the layout is cluttered and difficult to read. (The teeny-tiny print on some pages didn’t help matters.) I also found that Tanaka’s plain-jane character designs made it difficult to distinguish the boys from the girls. Whenever Nabeshima removed his Harvey suit, I confused him with the two female members of the G.S.G. S.W.A.T. team.

What redeemed Omukae Desu for me were the two lengthy bonus stories at the end of volume one. “The Law of Change”—the story of a plump girl who finds her weight-loss motivation in a pistol-packing robot named Agatha—and “Tokiwa Nihonmatsu”—a rite-of-passage story about a young woman deciding whether to attend university or work at a bakery—are more coherent than any of the three Omukae adventures. The artwork is less frenetic, the characters more fully developed, and the moods as wistful as they are jokey. As “Law of Change” and “Tokiwa” reveal, Tanaka can be a first-rate storyteller when he isn’t laboring so hard to be funny. If only he’d applied this more restrained approach in the volume’s main stories, I might have given Omukae a more enthusiastic thumbs up.