Manga Retrospective: Undead Unluck by Yoshifumi Tozuka
Fuuko Izumo has had a miserable life due to her curse of Unluck. Anyone Fuuko touches suffers a statistically improbable misfortune, often to lethal effect, with the first victims being her own parents. At age 18, the only thing that has kept her alive has been wanting to find out how her favorite manga was going to come out, and that has just now ended. Thus Fuuko is about to commit suicide.
She’s interrupted in her attempt by a rather rude fellow who is not exactly immune to her power, so much as that he, Undead, cannot be killed. At least not by the first few disasters she inflicts on him. But Undead is pretty sure that Unluck is the key to him finally being able to truly die. He convinces her to stay alive long enough to at least test this theory, and Fuuko nicknames him “Andy.”
The pair soon find themselves pursued by other superpowered beings from the “Union” until they manage to wangle their way into membership. It turns out that the majority of human superbeings in this story are “Negators”, able to negate one rule or operating principle of the universe, thus each of them has an “Un” in their power name, like Untruth and Unjustice. While the setting at first appears to be “like Earth but with secret superpowers”, the truth is far weirder.
This “battle manga” ran from January 2020 to January 2025 in Weekly Shounen Jump. The early chapters were a bit cringy to read due to Andy’s lack of understanding the concept of “consent.” (He’s unkillable, but has some severe memory problems.) As such, he’s initially a casual sex offender until Fuuko gets through to his basic decency. But other than that, there were interesting ideas, hot battles and fun art, so the series became popular.
Fuuko turned out to be a resilient heroine, growing from the suicidal shut-in of the beginning to a confident and resourceful leader. Her interest in others and compassion proved key to resolving many incidents and eventually bringing a cycle of violence to a close.
One of the fun features of the series is that even characters that seemed disposable in the beginning become important again with time; even that favorite manga series turns out to be more than it initially appears.
If there’s a major disappointment in the series it’s that the last few volumes feel like the author was rushing to get to the end, so skipping a lot of minor story beats so that the main plotline can reach a satisfactory conclusion. It’s less that the ending is missing anything as that a lot of cool fights and side stories just got skimmed over.
Still, it’s a good ending where everyone is better off than when it began.
There was an animated adaptation, but in North America it got stuck on Disney Plus and barely advertised, so a lot of potential viewers missed it.
Content note: As mentioned, attempted suicide. Early on there’s some skeevy behavior by Andy, and the nature of his powers tends toward gore and nudity. (He gets much better about consent and gains some magical clothing, but is still gory.) Quite a bit of death and children in peril.
The entire manga series is still up on the Viz website and should also be available in print.
Highly recommended to fans of battle series.
