Love Me to Death is an online serial manga on Webtoons with chapters available weekly for free (and the three most recent chapters are paid.) It centers on Victor, a necromancer, who lives in a South American flavored town, part of an empire controlled by the Church of the God of Life. Necromancy is outlawed and punished by death, seeing as the Church believes necromancers to be all evil forces responsible for the imprisonment of their god.
Being a necromancer is also very obvious, as their blood glitters with magic. So a whole culture has developed where people sign blood contracts for the most basic things, and the streets are patrolled by Knights of Life who wear holy armor and wield holy weapons.
Victor is secretly approached by one of the richest men in town, Enrique Olivarez, who promises to get him safely out of the empire in exchange for Victor raising his fiancée, Mercedes, who died during the wedding vows, from the dead. Victor uses the ritual Enrique provides, but it ties Mercedes to his heart, and as a necromancer he’s the only one who can hear Mercedes speak.
Mercedes’ mysterious death might not have been so mysterious to the Church, and now with the walking dead following him Victor is exposed with the church after him, an overwhelming attachment to someone else’s wife, and the richest man in town unpredictably either his ally or accuser.
The depth of world building and storytelling drew me in to this comic. The art is lovely, the pace on par with what I’ve come to expect from comics and manga, and the world setting is just fascinating. I am a sucker for magical conspiracy stories, and oops romances. Love Me to Death straddles the line between the dark storytelling and the romance angle very well, not letting the story become just a relationship drama, nor dismissing the darkness of the blood-obsessed theocracy its set in.
It’s an engaging, interesting read, whose only flaw so far is that it’s an unfinished serial.