Hideo Suzuki is a manga artist plagued by visions of ghosts attacking him as well as people to either lord over and humiliate or debate ideas an an intellectual equal. He is socially awkward, works long hours to complete projects before deadlines, and talks to himself a lot. As he's going though his everyday life, a fire occurs at a nursing home. People are increasingly out sick and random attacks start happening until society can no longer function with the influx of zombies.
I Am A Hero has an intriguing premise: seeing the zombie apocalypse start with an unlikely protagonist. Unfortunately, Hideo himself is awful and iinsufferable to read. He is not successful as a manga artist and finds every way to lash out and blame others for his failures. His self image oscillates from being completely confident and arrogant to being insecure and threatened by anyone successful. In addition to all this, Hideo hallucinates frequently. Sometimes his anxieties take visual form and haunt him, but he mostly sees two people to have conversations with. One is Yakima, a pathetic worm of a man that Hideo can humiliate, lecture, and feel superior to. The other is nameless and looks like a more put together and attractive version of himself who he views as an equal to debate with. I like the conceptual idea of this as it shows how Hideo really is. However, he's prone to long, masturbatory speeches about the value of his manga and disgustingly degrades Yakima.
The biggest problem I have with this manga is how women are portrayed. Tekko, Hideo's girlfriend, seems nice on the surface, but always falls short of his expectations. She's constantly talking about her ex, refusing sex, and getting belligerent and abusive when drunk. The other named woman is Mii-chan, Hideo's co-worker. She is beautiful and has illicit affairs with her boss and others of the staff. This is all that is literally known about her. In the background, a show called Boob Morning is shown on television multiple times, which features cleavage baring women reporting the news. Hideo hates beautiful reporters because he thinks they don't value the news and would save themselves in the event of a disaster. Every man in the book objectifies women and treats them like sex machines only to insult them when rejected. During this scene at a singles mixer, the men all lie about their age and actually have girlfriends. I was hoping all this would mean something more later like Hideo would see the error of his ways or something, but all of this misogyny and objectification goes without anything to counter it and gets worse.
The origin of the zombies isn't explained. The disease is transmitted through bites and the afflicted become mindless. They are able to say small words and phrases, but attack anyone. The first instance is when a car strikes a pedestrian who gets up and keeps walking with a broken neck. Very effective. The best part of this manga is the scene where Hideo peers through Tekko's mail slot and she gets closer and closer to him. These panels are two pages wide and have the same effect as Sadako coming through the TV in The Ring. The zombies are killed on odd ways. Caving in their skulls doesn't seem to work while slitting their throats does. It doesn't make sense to me. Unfortunately, the zombie plague seems to only be the opportunity for Hideo to see women reduced to what he believes they are and then to kill them. Tekko becomes the perfect, thoughtful girlfriend and only says she loves him, even though she's trying to bite him. On the other hand, Mii-chan is a bloated corpse and only says "penis" while trying to fellate any objects near her mouth. This portrayal was particularly disgusting and shocking. I almost stopped reading right there. Maybe it was meant to be funny, but it shows how women are literally viewed by people like this. In life, both women were disappointing to him.
I Am a Hero as a title is a complete joke. No one is represented well here. All of the men are portrayed as liars, cheaters, and misogynists while all of the women are greedy, manipulative, or sex objects. No characters are more than a stereotype unfortunately. The zombie aspects don't come in until the end of the omnibus and the rules didn't make much sense. This book failed on almost every level. I normally wouldn't read the next one but I bought them at the same time.
My rating: 1/5 fishmuffins
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