Review by Frank Plowright

Until the final few chapters of Omnibus 5, I Am A Hero focussed almost exclusively on Hideo Suzuki and whoever he was hanging around with in the new zombie era. However, the spotlight has switched and having become used to Hideo and his eccentricities he’s entirely absent here. Instead the focus remains on Takashi Ezaki and the folk he’s hooked up with, one of whom likes to wander around in their underwear.

As some zombies can pass for almost human, creator Kengo Hanazawa has his cast use a well conceived identification technique, the chain game. To identify as human anyone questioned must be able to string together a collection of words, each beginning with the last letter of the word quoted to them. Takashi stutters. As he’s been locked in his room since the outbreak, actually seeing what’s happening rather than reading about it online is one hell of a shock, and Hanazawa comes up with some horrific images, such as a river clogged with corpses. He also adds to some practicalities. Cooking curry, for instance, is ill advised as the smell attracts zombies.

By now the quality of Hanazawa’s art should be a given. It seems heavily dependent on shipping in images and manipulating them, as there’s a precision to technology and buildings that doesn’t apply to people. They can sometimes have a realism equivalent to the backgrounds, and sometimes have wide open mouths. It’s a stylistic quirk. Much of the outside action takes place in pouring rain, and Hanazawa draws up a storm for that.

When asked what his interests are, Takashi can only come up with being online, so while he’s also socially awkward, he’s not as dependent on routine as Hideo, but on the other hand is more timid, stuck with a lunatic among the new group and doesn’t have a gun. For him a fifty yard trip across the street is a fraught affair.

Hanazawa opens up gender issues, which so far don’t amount to anything serious, but given the scale of I Am A Hero it’s probably a pointer toward things to come. Instead the problem hovering in the background for most of the book is whether messages from people claiming to be in a school building can be trusted. Right before the end, though, Hanazawa introduces a startling new development, which will be spoiled by reading the back cover blurb before the book. It’s interesting, and explains the switch of focus to Takashi before a strangely balletic combat over double page spreads takes us to the end.

Takashi takes some getting used to after Hideo, but you’ll come to like him, and the new information’s a game changer to take us into Omnibus 7.