Forum - View topicREVIEW: I am a Hero [Omnibus] GN 1
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13246 |
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Uh, isn't that like 99% of all zombie fiction? Pretty much every zombie story I've ever seen apparently take place in worlds where zombie films don't exist. There's always some moron who approaches a zombie and asks "Hey are you okay?" some moron who thinks a little bite is no big deal, and some moron who doesn't aim for the head. |
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Shenl742
Posts: 1526 |
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Honestly, reading through it, it felt like a less charming, severely padded out Shawn of the Dead.
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Sounds like someone decided to write an entire book about Kondo Tatsumi from WWZ. Looking forward to the film coming out, if it ever does here.
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
 Posts: 2679 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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True. I felt like this one took that to the extreme - usually you've got one guy saying, "Dude, those are zombies!" or figuring it out faster than everyone else, but in this book absolutely everyone seems to be on the same clueless page. There is spoiler[Hideo's coworker who seems a little more with it, but I thought he was more seizing it as an excuse for revenge] than figuring out what was really going on. Hmmm...could the only zombie manga where they know about zombies beforehand be Sankarea? |
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Utsuro no Hako
Posts: 1060 |
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This is the great conundrum with zombie stories. With werewolves and vampires, the knowledge of how to deal with them is supposed to be ancient folklore that everyone knows (even when it was invented by Bram Stoker or F. W. Murnau). But modern zombies were invented by George Romero for Night of the Living Dead and bear almost no resemblance to the folkloric zombies of voodoo. Now if zombies were to appear in real life, why would they follow the rules laid out in some movie? It makes no sense. But the alternative is to have everyone be ignorant of zombie movies, which is even harder to swallow for modern audiences.
The only movie that ever came up with a good workaround is Return of the Living Dead, which supposes that the original Night was a documentary about a chemical weapons accident. |
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Whis-pur
Posts: 131 |
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I hate zombies (because they're stupid) and bought this just as a blind buy since it was so critically acclaimed, and I must admit that before the zombies showed up I was absolutely loving this. I wouldn't call the first volume a slow burn, though. It made these characters more three dimensional than any other character I've read in manga, at least recently. I absolutely loved Hideo's relationship with his girlfriend, i thought they complimented each other perfectly. Once the zombies did come in I felt cheated. lots of action happening fast, more focus on how zombies kill or how they're killed. It bugged me.
On a side note, did anyone else notice that when Hideo opens his door in chapter one he has Gantz in his manga shelf? |
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Themaster20000
 Posts: 877 |
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I'd say it has a shot coming out here with it on account of it being a zombie film and it being a co-production with Korea;so I could see a label like Magnet,or Shout Factory picking it up. I thought it was great how it starts out as this character-study before turning into the usual zombie movie. The only baffling thing is the release schedule Dark Horse has for this,with the next volume coming in October. |
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melmouth
Posts: 167 |
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Totally! The content of this volume would have made a great slice of life manga about adult life, which in reality is very often sad, disappointing, disorganized, nutty, and/or gross. The realistic drawing used here complements that sense of staying close to reality perfectly. (How hard that drawing must have been to do! This is a long manga. The amount of work that went into making it boggles the mind.) For those who can identify with—or just be unable to look away from—the life of a main character who is seriously dysfunctional, yet always determined, this manga perfectly sets up Hideo to be the hero of the story of a disintegrating world. After all, who really is likely to be able to survive in such a world—someone who has learned to fit into the normal world and prosper in it, or someone who hasn't, and has nothing left to lose when that world goes bust? |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7361 |
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Man, I kept debating this one at the comic shop, but seeing some of the comments here is making me go "nah, I'll leave it alone or get it from the library first".
I'm not really big on zombies to begin with, I just don't really find them interesting. Shaun of the Dead is easily my least favorite of the Cornetto Trilogy for example. So I sort of looked at this and went "do I really want any more zombies? I don't even like zombies to begin with!" And now I'm stuck trying to think if I actually own any zombie manga (even if the "Z" word is different), not including maybe some random one-off thing some shonen heroes fight, but is actually about zombies. And also not like, a sentient, thinking, feeling, talking zombie either, so nothing out of Monster Musume, Franken Fran, Soul Eater, or Parasyte in that case, but I mean mindless horde type zombies. Maybe Junji Ito did a one-shot thing at one point that I own? Then again, his forte is making chairs, fish, and spirals creepy (and damn does he do it well). I guess the closest I really have is Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but it's very rare at that. But I guess I just find zombie apocalypses boring in general, I doubt even a good one is likely to change my mind. |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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Yeah, I can't work up any enthusiasm for this at all. Zombies, be they as a central piece or anything else, have been thoroughly mined at this point: no amount of character study on a misfit can mask that. I saw this as Shawn of the Dead already.
I can see people enjoying this, but this really isn't for me. This story lost me at the word "zombie". |
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ChrisAcoltzi
Posts: 1 |
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For those of you not giving this manga a chance just because of the zombies, please know that the zombies are a small part of a bigger picture. After some chapters you can see clues that something much much greater is going on, thats what I like about the story. Also there are great character interactions, you guys will see chapters with no zombies at all and a lot of dialoge.
To me this is one of the best mangas I've read in a long time, it does diserve a chance. |
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Levitz9
Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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That's what they said about World War Z and The Walking Dead. |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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I wonder if people would truly consider that one a "zombie manga"...or would they throw it more into the "monster girl" category? |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6469 |
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Don't know about World War Z but in The Walking Dead Zombies are secondary to the plot. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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George Romero said of The Walking Dead "it's a soap opera with a zombie occasionally," but I actually disagree with that. The constant threat to survival is pinnacle to all the drama in the show, and gore and violence seems to be its main draw. Not all zombie stories are the same. Well, most have the survival thing, but not all have the gore (School-Live for example, at least as far as I saw)). I Am a Hero sounds like it really stands out with its unique, dysfunctional (and perhaps mentally disturbed) protagonist. The exploration of flawed characters with nuances in fantastical setting can be really interesting. Will be scouring my library for it. Thanks for the review!
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