I am a Hero Omnibus Volume 1

The art is so well done. And I am terrified of zombies, so I decided to check this out.

It's a slow one. Our hero Hideo is a typical awkward nerdy assistant manga artist. He talks to himself and seems to have an imaginary friend. He's afraid of the dark. He carries out long conversations or freakouts in his head. He's probably borderline hikkikomori. He's also a bit self-absorbed. The characters in this one are all really flawed. Almost unbearable. But our hero, Hideo had a brief life as a manga-ka before his series got pulled, and he's had trouble ever since.

As we follow him through his daily life–working as an assistant artist, visiting his nice girlfriend, taking care of her when she becomes a lousy drunk, listening to her and being jealous of her friendship with her ex, freaking out over his own lack of life and fame, being a nervous wreck–we slowly see weird things start happening in the background. Very slowly. Like so slow, zombies don't actually appear until the end of the first volume in the omnibus, which is over half the omnibus.

And then the excrement hits the air conditioning. And zombies are everywhere, and our character is not really prepared, but he has a gun, and that's something.

I get what the manga-ka was trying to do, but the story unfolds really slowly. And so many of the characters are borderline despicable that I almost didn't care about any of them at all. The men all say stupid things about women, and that's annoying, but it's also supposed to be. Hideo is self-absorbed, but he's the least lousy of them. I'll check out the next omnibus to see what character growth occurs. And I'm also really hoping that there will be more zombies.