Review by Frank Plowright

What has always been an inventive and imaginative view of the zombie apocalypse scenario took an astonishingly surreal turn toward the end of Omnibus 7. Let’s just say that even with everything else that’s been going on Hideo couldn’t have imagined the situation he’s now in, and readers certainly couldn’t. How strange are his new circumstances? Well, the sample art supplies a hint without giving too much away.

Over the opening sequences Kengo Hanazawa again resorts to cityscapes drawn with extraordinary realistic precision, yet populated by zombies. The realism accentuates the terror, as it could be our world, but just soak in those beautiful renderings. Hanazawa’s also becoming more comfortable drawing people, as there are fewer of the frog mouthed individuals seen in earlier volumes.

As far as the adventure goes, in addition to the strange creature in its underpants who saved everyone last time, there’s another anomaly as the zombies no longer seem to be attacking Hiromi and Oda. They carry around half of this volume on their own, and through their conversations Hanazawa shows how they’re very different people with different attitudes to life that aren’t just down to the gap in their ages. That plays into an interesting aspect of I Am A Hero, which is Hanazawa’s lack of sentimentality. His loyalty is to the world he’s created and what that brings out in people rather than the people they might be, yet he also steers clear of the cheap shocks that would be so easy in that world.

However, that’s not to say shocks are absent, and Hanazawa delivers one of the biggest in the entire series amid another compelling volume including some real darkness.

While concentrating on a primary cast, Hanazawa also enjoys an interlude looking at how somewhere outside Japan is coping with the zombie outbreak, and it seems this time he fancied drawing the Italian city of Lucca. It’s more than a slaughterfest, though, as amid some shocks there’s someone with theories about why there was a zombie outbreak in the first place. And who’s the character on the cover? They don’t actually appear until the final pages, so something to discover in Omnibus 9.