This Zombie Apocalypse Fooled Us: I Am a Hero Closing Thoughts

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This Zombie Apocalypse Fooled Us: I Am a Hero Closing Thoughts

10/27/2019 4:37pm

This Zombie Apocalypse Fooled Us

By Philip Simon

I Am A Hero, by Kengo Hanazawa, ends this week with Volume 11. Editor Philip Simon leaves us with these final thoughts on the series.

Kengo Hanazawa played us. It was long con, starting with I Am a Hero chapter 1 and continuing for 264 chapters.

"Who is the 'hero' of I Am a Hero?" becomes a big question after our courageous trio of Hideo, Hiromi, and Nurse Yabu comes together and realizes that the antibodies in Hiromi’s system could possibly save humanity. They make a solid team, acting heroically together.

We're set up to think Hideo Suzuki is the book's hero from the beginning, though, as the frustrated manga creator faces several personal problems during a growing zombie outbreak that he believes he is imagining. We spend a lot of time with him at the start of the ZQN attacks, almost moving from moment to moment with him as he makes good and bad decisions. Not fully reclusive, like some of the "Kurusu" people seem to be, but very awkward with other people, Hideo talks to an imaginary friend. He’s been a victim of panic attacks since childhood, and now in his mid-thirties he's often incapacitated by fear—fear of intangible things, mostly.

Our second possible "hero" is Hiromi, the high school girl whose friends betray her just as the zombie apocalypse is starting. Hiromi is arguably better able to maneuver through this unique zombie outbreak than Hideo, and she often prompts him into action or rescues him from "frozen" fear-states when he’s incapable of doing anything or deciding on their next move. Hiromi has her flaws, but it's her sheer will that seems to (you'll have to put the pieces together yourself) end the zombie outbreak and the zombie-human blended "hives" that start appearing at the end of this series.

Third and fourth picks for our "heroes" of I Am a Hero are Tsugumi "Nurse Yabu" Oda and her lost sibling who's mentioned early in the story and who appears (well, re-appears, but you'll have to figure out that puzzle yourself too!) as a zombie in our page-to-page-to-page turner of a finale. This twist with Nurse Yabu and her sibling has been building for a long time, and it seems to make us re-think Hiromi's role in this tale as we possibly place the survival of humankind on the shoulders of . . . a zombie and the spirit of its dead sister . . . ?

Masterfully, in the final chapters of this zombies-everywhere epic, we're hit with several twists that have been building for a while (there’s a late "Kurusu reveal" that's a really good surprise), as information comes to us quickly and characters both major and minor influence a complicated series of events that will decide the fate of the human race and the ZQN infestation. A lot of fun puzzles—including some seemingly-hallucinated scenes from earlier in the series—come to light in our final I Am a Hero Omnibus volume. Two things that readers can consider as they pick up their copies of omnibus volume 11 are the visual nod to the front cover of volume 1 and this new question: "Is Hideo more or less of a hero when the final I Am a Hero chapter ends?'

I Am A Hero Volume 11 can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, TFAW, and at your local comic shop now.