A story with a devastating ending: I Am a Hero — Hive

I started watching The Walking Dead right when the series was released and at the time, especially in its first seasons, it was a pretty entertaining series, with pretty epic and impressive moments, but little by little this series was becoming something totally boring, monotonous and even ridiculous, so I stopped watching it and started reading the comics, which at first I didn’t know that the series was based on a comic book series, of the same name, so I started reading them and I liked them a lot, but soon after I read them I was already up to date with the publications and I had to wait a lot for a new publication of the comic, so I discovered that, there was a manga that covers these same topics of “zombies” or “infected” and that, being totally honest, this manga handles all these aspects much better, that manga is: I Am a Hero.

I Am a Hero tells us the story of Hideo’s survival. Before the zombie apocalypse, he worked as a mangaka, being an assistant in the creation of a manga, a rather mediocre character whose main purpose in life is to become a Hero, and that is something that he repeats throughout the history of this manga and also tells it to several characters. Hideo’s life even though he doesn’t live so badly, he wants something else, he has a girlfriend but in the first chapters you can see that he is not happy with her, you can see a desperate man in mediocrity. The first volumes of the sleeve, are a little dense because it does not enter fully into the zombie apocalypse, as they show us little by little how was the life of Hideo before the radical change. Soon his girlfriend becomes infected and he must kill her, it is in that moment where Hideo’s life changes completely, but now he has the opportunity to become the Hero he always wanted to be.

Throughout this story he will have to survive with the little knowledge he has in fighting, fortunately he also knows characters who will help him do all this. However, as in The Walking Dead, despite being in an apocalyptic world where many people have become totally irrational beings thirsty for blood and flesh, one of the greatest threats of these two worlds, are the people themselves, as they find themselves in a world now lawless, can do the things that previously were forbidden by the law itself, so in this manga we will see groups of murderers, rapists and robbers, in short, people who have left their humanity, so that their lives are based only on survival at all costs, violence and power.

As a good manga of the zombie genre, Hideo’s life is going to go through a lot of tragedy, but that doesn’t discourage our Hero to become what he wants, however and without going into spoilers, the end of this manga left me a deep sadness, because, to those who have read this manga, they will know for all what happened Hideo, many unfair things happened to him, but of course, some of them also happened because of the own stupidity of the protagonist or of some other hehehe character, But what I want to say is that, despite not being a “sad” ending, it was an ending that left an emptiness in my chest, it made me feel desolate and clear, also sad, because of the final situation with Hideo, it is a strange feeling and only this manga and another one I will talk about in the next days, have made me feel sadness and emptiness in my heart with their respective endings.

Although the next manga I’ll tell you about, all those feelings happen in a big part of the story and not only in the end, but that’s subject for another day. I Am a Hero leaves some questions unanswered and some plots unfinished, but it’s a pretty deep story, which shows the evolution of our protagonist and of a society succumbing to despair and violence. It’s a bit dense, at the beginning but little by little we adapt to his way of telling the story.

I Am a Hero has excellent drawings quite realistic and with many double pages where we can see large drawings with many details. It is a manga that shows with enough cruelty the transformation of a person to a zombie and also the deaths, it is quite graphic and knows how to create tense and grotesque moments. Not long ago they adapted this manga to a movie in Live Action that includes the first volumes, it’s a decent movie, I liked it in great part, it’s a good adaptation.

As a conclusion, I Am a Hero is not a perfect manga, but it is a work that, at least personally, left me with a great emptiness and quite sadness, and that some things remained unfinished, it is still a quite deep manga with a great character development.