I Am a Hero

## I Am a Hero *I Am a Hero* by Kengo Hanazawa is widely considered the greatest zombie manga ever created — a slow-burning, psychologically rich horror epic that uses the genre to conduct a devastating examination of inadequacy, masculinity, and what it means to finally become the person you told yourself you were. Serialized in *Big Comic Spirits* from 2009 to 2017 with 291 chapters across 22 volumes, it is a landmark of seinen horror. Hideo Suzuki is 35 years old and a failure. He works as an assistant manga artist for a successful creator whose style he helped develop, drawing backgrounds and crowd scenes while his own manga submissions keep getting rejected. He lies to himself constantly — he tells himself he's an important creator, that his time is coming, that he's different from the others. He owns an illegal shotgun he claims to keep for self-defense, though he has never once used it and is afraid of it. His girlfriend is emotionally checking out. He sees hallucinations. He is the kind of person who has spent his entire adult life building an elaborate internal narrative about who he is, while avoiding the evidence of who he actually is. Then a zombie apocalypse begins — slowly, disturbingly, the infected acting strange at first before the full horror becomes undeniable. *I Am a Hero* is one of the few zombie stories that earns the genre's philosophical implications: what does survival mean for a person who wasn't really living? Hanazawa's realistic art style and Hideo's painfully observed interiority make this both terrifying and unexpectedly moving.