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I Am a Hero

I am a hero 11

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CON LA AMENAZA DE LOS ZQN EXTENDIÉNDOSE POR TODO JAPÓN, HAY GRUPOS QUE EMPIEZAN A ORGANIZARSE…
Usando un foro de Internet como único contacto con el exterior, Ezaki pensaba que todo esta perdido y que moriría a manos de los ZQN. Pero cuando el grupo de Kurusu se presenta en su casa para reclutarle los acompaña por falta de alternativas aunque no las tiene todas consigo…

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2013

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70 people want to read

About the author

Kengo Hanazawa

113 books137 followers
Kengo Hanazawa (花沢健吾 Hanazawa Kengo, born January 5, 1974) is a Japanese manga artist known for his seinen works. He won the Topic Award of the 2005 Sense of Gender Awards for Ressentiment and was nominated for the 3rd, 4th and 5th Manga Taisho for I Am a Hero.

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5 stars
86 (19%)
4 stars
187 (43%)
3 stars
127 (29%)
2 stars
26 (6%)
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6 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for Tawfek.
3,827 reviews2,204 followers
January 17, 2023
best volume in a while now.
i love the POV panels i don't remember if i have scene any artist implement this style before but kengo hanazawa does it pretty good i only hate it when he makes us see through a bloody mask.
I also love the chat threads on the forums pretty good idea as well.
This volume we get to know the kurusu team and their safety procedures.
the many individual goals among the crew.
they will fallout very fast i think.
this kurusu dude is weird there is something off about him i don't know what i wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be a zombie lol.
i like the science guy he was on fire this volume with the discovery of where the zombies are going
and talking to the other guys on wireless wave.
Profile Image for Jon Ureña.
Author 3 books121 followers
March 3, 2020
Four and a half.

For a good while, the narrative has been separated from our main protagonists. Instead the author made us follow a new group of survivors generally considered Kurusu’s group; Kurusu is the half-deranged hikikomori who had become an internet sensation during the earlier stages of the apocalypse. This guy is their leader, although only in the spiritual sense. He’s like a less reliable Joker. It’s not like they follow this guy for ideological reasons: nobody wants to launch themselves first against the zombies, knowing that a simple scratch can doom a survivor, but this guy does and is proficient at it. Beyond that, they seem uncomfortable around him.

We get to meet the many people involved in this group. Although they follow a clown that only wears underwear, they are a decent bunch. It takes a committed author to present a completely new group of people 10-11 volumes in and them being fully realized, distinct characters. We have a cautious hardass who suffers no fools, a short-haired stoic loner woman who reads Thoreau, a fake cheerful weapons crafter in his forties, a tough middle aged woman who handles the kitchen, a rebellious and volatile student, a pretty female student who constantly wears her uniform, her hair in pigtails and a gas mask (time for a new fetish), and a couple of arbalist (people proficient at shooting with crossbows) siblings who seem somewhat at odds with the rest of the group. I very much enjoyed their dynamics and small conflicts with each other, generally due to being people who normally wouldn’t have stayed together in a house, and that have to handle the high tension of being isolated in a country/world lost to the zombols.

In any case, we first meet this group when they risk their hides to rescue the 21 year old kid we started this subplot following: he’s a 4chan user (or the story equivalent) who had spent the apocalypse holed up in his boarded bedroom, trying to ignore his infected mother attempting to break through. The forum users, in between sharing information and fears, had decided to come clean about their real names and locations. The Kurusu group chose that list to recruit new people close enough. The loner woman, the cautious hardass and Kurusu himself break into this kid’s house, kill his father and then immobilize his mother. The kid, anxious about facing not only the still living zombie of his mother, but also a sudden group of violent, suspicious people breaking into his parents’ place, begrudgingly obliges Kurusu’s initiation proposal: for the kid to kill his own zombified mother. After he does and they get outside, they have to deal with around a dozen zombies alerted by the activities, but the male crossbowman takes care of them from a hiding place. We later learn that they also came with an Italian survivor, but he got bitten along the way.

The author used this kid as a sort of vessel character for the audience to learn first hand the dynamics of a new society. We learn what they know about the zombie situation: there doesn’t seem to be a government, and the zombies behave following the patterns they used to follow in life, so they tend to be far less active at night, they are dangerous at rush hour, they tend to move towards houses at the end of the day (although they haven’t retained enough of their intelligence to actually enter their own houses). They even stand under awnings in the rain. Also, the group has established some rules in order to avoid contagion: if they come late from a raid, as it happens to be the case for the cautious hardass and the kid, they accept getting locked into a room inside the shelter while handcuffed, for three hours. After the rest of the group knows those stragglers haven’t gotten infected, they deal with them normally. The weapons crafter sort of takes this kid under his wing. He tells him that he has learned that the zombies as a group seem to be heading south for some mystifying reason, which obviously suggests that every survivor should haul ass north. He also brings him to the house next door, where they have restrained a MILF housewife who had gotten infected. We learn that zombies’ hearts have stopped, although the heart of the high schooler zombie girl from the main plot still beats. This weapons crafter invites the kid to poke the zombie housewife in her ample breasts to show that she remains sensitive to touch. He reveals that he had also experimented with sensitivity in her genital area, I’m sure for purely scientific reasons. I’m guessing this story will also gloss over that the zombies’ existence breaks the laws of thermodynamics, given that they don’t eat people for nourishment, and their bodies shouldn’t have kept going for that long.

They chose the new kid as responsible for the task nobody wants: to bring food and supplies to the arbalist siblings, who stand guard in a nearby shack. It involves leaving the safety of the shelter and crossing the wild. The kid gets a crush on the pretty arbalist girl, and we also learn that these two are attempting to break apart from the main group and move towards Tokyo. They drag the kid into the group dynamics by making him keep quiet about their intentions.

The weapons crafter also handles the radio. For the first time they contact another group fifty kilometers away. Although everybody is happy to be able to speak with each other, they are wary of inviting dangerous marauders in (a significant part of why we should be wary about contacting aliens), and seemingly both lie about their group strengths. The group also learns through 4chan that there’s another survivor group holding out in the local school, and an argument breaks between the students who want to go, and the older weapons crafter who suspects that most of the information might be false (because schools were huge sources of infection early on) and that dangerous groups might be involved. They decide to send a scouting unit to find out the veracity of that information. By the end of this volume that unit hasn’t gone out yet; the cautious hardass has guided the kid and the male student to the neighboring house, where he intends to use the MILF as a stabbing bag for the younglings to get comfortable with brutality. I felt bad for the housewife not only because she was hot but also because the series has established that some zombies are just ill and facing unavoidable delusions. Despite her heart having stopped, this might be a half-conscious person having to suffer the torture of getting repeatedly stabbed for no fault of her own. But as the cautious hardass states, for the survivors it doesn’t matter what these zombies were in life: now they are just threats to dispose of. I wonder if this is setup for when they end up meeting our coprotagonist high school zombie girl.

Meanwhile, as the Thoreau reading loner was dozing off in the bathtub, a random zombie gets a peek of her through the bathroom window (why on Earth would you have a window in the bathroom?) and pushes his way in. The loner restrains the zombie as the tough cook decapitates it. Before, though, that woman had ordered the fearful female student to alert Kurusu, who generally keeps to himself, to come down and handle the zombie. However, we see Kurusu drooling while speaking with himself the same way an infected person does. Given that he would have gotten infected long ago, it seems that he might be another person who has managed to keep the infection at bay maybe through being generally deranged.

What I loved the most about this volume is getting immersed in the daily goings of that sub-society, finding out where each character stands, how they clash with each other, etc. Although they will probably end up meeting the main protagonists and creating problems for them, these aren’t bad people (except for maybe Kurusu), and I don’t want them to die. That’s how you should do antagonists: just interesting people needing to overcome a bad situation. I want to keep reading; too bad I’m at work right now, where many are freaking out about the all too close SARS-CoV-2 infections we even share a building with, and we get anxious about the suspiciously high number of people in the office coughing. A mere five minutes before writing these words, I went up to the bathroom, the men’s bathroom obviously, and there was an old woman wearing a surgical mask and coughing uncontrollably. I left, and in another bathroom I washed my hands frantically. Now I’m back at the office to continue my mostly meaningless work.
This is fine dog
If this threat ends up getting much worse, our modern, forcefully “globalized”, “down with borders” societies (people believe themselves so wise in comparison to how their ancestors had survived for millennia) might end up realizing, like Europe did after the plagues that wiped out half of its population, that isolated, self-reliable, high-trust communities are the best way to endure an indifferent universe.

Something that attracts me to these kinds of stories is how the population having been drastically reduced strips civilization of its bullshit: you need to eat, you need to shit, you need to stay alive, and someone has to provide food, someone needs to guard you while you shit, and you need to defend yourself and know how to kill if necessary in order to survive another day. Those are the essentials of life for any living being; it beats this current lifestyle of pushing numbers on spreadsheets, as a tiny cogs in machines you don’t care about nor care for you, in order to produce for someone else a bunch of money, which is an abstraction that doesn’t reflect any real value except for the enforced perception of it. There really should be far fewer people in this world and it is a good thing that we are procreating less, or at least it would be a neutrally good thing if every society was doing it as well. As things stand, though, this world is doomed to get worse. We might even end up willing a zombie apocalypse of sorts into existence.
Profile Image for Jesus Flores.
2,593 reviews67 followers
February 23, 2024
After the rescue they

Its good to see the other people extra, and to see how they do, the volumen helps present them, show us that they might be together but they are not a close group, some even plan to scape. Nice cliffhanger.

The only thing is
Profile Image for Ignacio Senao f.
986 reviews54 followers
November 6, 2016
Más cosas buenas de esta saga no puedo, podría si tuvieran varias vidas más. En resumidas cuentas tiene todo lo que me gusta conjugado: zombis, ambientación asiática, cultura japonesa, acción continuada, muchísimo terror (bien hecho), horror asiático y personajes muy bien perfilados.

Este volumen expande la historia, introduciendo un grupo de chiflados que hacen cosas propias de ellos.
Profile Image for Fugo Feedback.
5,108 reviews174 followers
July 26, 2019
Qué buen color de tapa, qué fea ilustración, pero qué genialidad de manga.
Profile Image for Vittorio Rainone.
2,082 reviews33 followers
September 1, 2017
Il primo difetto di questo volume è che è passato troppo tempo dal precedente. E quindi non ritrovare il protagonista delle pagine precedenti è disorientante. Ma Hanazawa sa raccontare benissimo, sicchè queste pagine più flemmatiche della baraonda appena vissuta negli altri numeri ci servono per tirare le fila di un mondo in disfacimento e per ampliare orizzontalmente la trama. Il classico gruppo di organizzati umani si è asserragliato in una casa in un paesino di campagna, compiendo sortite per il cibo e vivendo una struttura para militare per sconfiggere la minaccia degli ZQN. Peccato che fermi non si possa rimanere, per lo meno a lungo, e una comunicazione radio spinge alcuni di loro a cercare di raggiungere un altro gruppo di sopravvissuti. Fra di loro, un tipo timido, riservato, non violento e assolutamente inadatto all'orrore in cui sono. Il secondo difetto di questo volume è che, probabilmente, ci vorrà troppo tempo per avere il prossimo volume.
Profile Image for 47Time.
3,491 reviews95 followers
August 27, 2023
Where in God's holy name is Hideo? Who thought it was a good idea not only to introduce over half a dozen new characters (all one-dimensional), but completely foget about the story's main character? As in the only character I care about.

1 review
August 3, 2018
Esse volume esquece por um tempo os protagonistas e tem como foco outro grupo de sobreviventes, dentre eles, o já mencionado Kurusu, jovem profeta do apocalipse zumbi.
A trama nesse volume é mais calma, tem 1 ou 2 momentos de tensão, mas nada que vale o destaque. No entanto o volume encaixa bem no mangá, servindo pra desenvolver a história, adicionar novos personagens a trama; mostrando o que aqueles comentários de fóruns significavam no volumes anteriores e mostra mais um pouco da situação nas ruas do Japão.
No entanto, algo que me incomoda é a representação do Kurusu. Pela descrição dele nos volumes anteriores, esperava um líder de grupo, forte e hábil. Mas é apenas um daqueles personagens comuns em seinen que são infantis e psicopatas...
Profile Image for Angel 一匹狼.
1,020 reviews63 followers
February 22, 2020
And here we continue with our new team of characters. This side-story is a little bit of a drag and to center it on Ezaki a head-scratching decision. The apparition of Kurusu doesn't add much either to the plot. And that without entering to the already too creepy Hanazawa's obsession with females, totally unnecessary for the story.

The best: the drawing style; the zombies and the atmosphere

The worst: the disposable characters; the creepy factor in relation to gender issues

6/10

(Castilian translation by Bernabé)
Profile Image for Gustavo.
901 reviews17 followers
October 25, 2019
Continúa la historia del extraño Kurusu y su alegre banda. Lo que más me gustan de los capítulos en los que hay un asentamiento es que siempre hay algún loco que se dedica a observar a los ZQN y nos da algunas pistas de lo que puedan ser o tener como objetivo los infectados. Este manga es excelente y adictivo hasta en los momentos lentos, me muero por saber que sigue.
Profile Image for Juan Carlos malik.
960 reviews352 followers
December 27, 2020
En mi opinión este libro, es introductorio para conocer otra parte del mundo devastado por los ZQN, por esta razón no aporta mucho a ala trama zombie. Sin embargo le pongo un 8 de calificación ya que nos menciona 3 cosas importantes de esta clase de zombies y hay un personaje muy retorcido, que puede cambiar la dinámica de la historia.
Profile Image for Paulina ෂ.
717 reviews
June 27, 2018
La historia continua con el grupo al que se ha unido Ezaki (quien, dicho sea de paso, no me agrada demasiado). Sin embargo parece haber ciertas discrepancias entre ellos mismos, no obstante la acción es continua y fluida cuando lo requiere, además que aparentemente hay pistas para llegar a un por qué.
Profile Image for electricyakuza.
24 reviews
April 5, 2019
Bastante interesante este tomo, aunque se eche de menos a Hideo, pero la nueva patrulla, y sobre todo Kurusu, prometen bastante.
Profile Image for Zaz.
1,940 reviews60 followers
August 4, 2024
Ce volume suit un autre groupe que j'ai trouvé globalement assez antipathique, donc c'était moins intéressant.
Profile Image for Amlan Chakraborty.
96 reviews
December 5, 2025
Ok, so now we are moving away from the primary characters.
It's that phase in the story where it appears to be running aimlessly like a headless chicken.
Profile Image for Dony Grayman.
7,091 reviews35 followers
May 19, 2019
Edición argentina, tomo 11 de 22. Este tomo ecuatorial traduce los capítulos 118 a 130 y además cuenta con páginas a color sorpresa a la mitad, entrando al capítulo 124.
Profile Image for Mark.
1,284 reviews
December 25, 2014
Ini yang disebut volume sempalan, ketika satu volume penuh didedikasikan untuk menceritakan pengalaman tokoh lain yang sama sekali tidak ada hubungannya dengan Hideo Suzuki yang sudah mengisi sepuluh volume pertama. Kali ini menampilkan Ezaki, yang masih selamat tidak menjadi zombie karena melakukan hikikomori. Sebenarnya cerita sempalan ini sudah dimulai sejak di volume 10, tapi di luar dugaan justru malah diceritakan secara penuh di kelanjutannya. Setelah diselamatkan oleh Kurusu dan lain-lain, Ezaki justru seolah mengambil peran utama dari Hideo. Mengesalkan, karena baik Hideo dan Ezaki punya karakter yang mirip – canggung, percaya diri yang rendah, tidak menarik secara fisik – tapi nasib yang agak berbeda. Jika kecenderungan ini masih diteruskan sampai satu-dua volume kedepan, sepertinya akan berpikir ulang untuk mengikuti kelanjutan cerita serial ini.
Profile Image for Bernardo.
Author 1 book6 followers
February 10, 2017
buena la historia alterna que se da en estos volúmenes
Profile Image for Camilo Guerra.
1,227 reviews20 followers
March 22, 2016
Los personajes que aparecierón en el capitulo final del tomo anterior, acá son los protagonistas absolutos, no sabemos de Hiromi, Hideo , el clavo...nada, acá tenemos otro grupo de sobrevivientes, que intentan hacer lo mejor posible, un par de adultos que intentan mantener el orden y la esperanza, unos jóvenes que son muy cliches ( el responsable, el tímido, el gallito, el apático...), aunque sirven para mostrar un par de puntos en la historia, como pistas sobre el comportamiento de los zombies, de resto, nada mas...el nivel del arte muy normalito, destacable un par de tomas de la ciudad, de resto, nada que sobresalga.
Profile Image for Biondy.
Author 9 books235 followers
December 10, 2014
Eeh... ini kenapa jadi fokus ke grup baru begini? Sama sekali tidak ada penampakan tokoh utama dari 10 nomor sebelumnya. Lumayan menarik sih ceritanya, tapi jadi terkesan dipanjang-panjangkan. Apalagi tokoh yang diselamatkan di grup ini kepribadiannya mirip dengan tokoh utama sebelumnya.

Btw, suka dengan kovernya kali ini. Hurufnya yang diberantakin juga lain banget kesannya :)).
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