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I Am a Hero

アイアムアヒーロー, Vol. 15

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ヒーローは、ZQNに咥えられた英雄!?

英雄・比呂美・小田…
閉ざされた三角関係が、微妙な変化を遂げていき…。

ZQNに咥えられ意識不明の英雄、
比呂美のキス(?)、
そして小田の体に起こる異変…。

…徐々に明らかになっていく、この世界。

物語が大きく動き出す!
大反響!大人気!黙示録第15巻!!

210 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2014

2 people are currently reading
64 people want to read

About the author

Kengo Hanazawa

113 books136 followers
Kengo Hanazawa (花沢健吾 Hanazawa Kengo, born January 5, 1974) is a Japanese manga artist known for his seinen works. He won the Topic Award of the 2005 Sense of Gender Awards for Ressentiment and was nominated for the 3rd, 4th and 5th Manga Taisho for I Am a Hero.

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5 stars
111 (29%)
4 stars
181 (47%)
3 stars
64 (16%)
2 stars
20 (5%)
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5 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
Profile Image for Tawfek.
3,824 reviews2,205 followers
January 19, 2023
I am still wondering about the visions of the mind.
Are they visions or is there like an alternate world where all the zombies communicate together and in this cerebral world kurusu saw Hideo and ran after him because he knew he didn't belong and was controlling that zombie?
Looks like Oda san sleeps around a lot she said it wasn't even the outlet mall and she can think of a few incidents where this would happen, i don't see her able to defend herself though so its a stupid decision that she wants to go alone.
One thing i like so much about Kengo's writing is the realism he can ignore so many things and we wouldn't even know about them like the positioning of the shotgun, where to put your cheek to aim right, how his rib got fractured due to the cpr they did on him.
I read a lot of things over the years with guns in them never have i ever read something that talks about the dangerous of shooting with the wrong position so yeah the guy did his homework like a pro or even better.
The ocean scene was sweet it reminds me of when we were young, we really did notice a lot of things back then and took our sweet time looking at them, i remember looking at the sky watching the moon and the stars and the clouds, trying to look at the sun, taking every opportunity to look at any water front i come across river or see
Profile Image for Jon Ureña.
Author 3 books121 followers
March 5, 2020
I’m reviewing chapters 13 to 15. An average of three stars, although there were worse moments and also better ones. Needless to say, spoilas.

We left our protagonist as he was coming back from picking mushrooms; part of his manly duty to provide for his former sex slave friend with benefits. Turns out that the high school zombie girl he was also caring for has woken up, in the sense that she no longer looks infected and is completely lucid. She greets him and comments on her unfamiliar surroundings as if she had no memory of the few weeks that passed since she fell to the infection in a roadside restaurant. The protagonist leaves her there to go fetch his nurse pal, who is smoking her last cigarettes in her car, bored out of her mind. She’s the kind of person who would attempt something crazy just to stave off boredom. My sister was like that; growing up with her was a nightmare, and fortunately I haven’t spoken to her in years. So I’m somewhat wary of this nurse character.

We see how their relationship has grown during this parenthesis we spent following another group of characters, and we are even treated to a flashback from when they first came to the camping lodge. After they, sweaty and having lacked a bath for a long, long time, carry the unconscious zambo high school girl to a bed inside the cabin they have chosen, the protagonist, maybe without thinking, caresses the nurse’s hand. She, blunt as usual, asks whether he wants to have sex. He recoils, and suggests that she doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to, particularly important, I guess, for someone who had survived for a while providing forced sex. But she adds that she’s willing. They get into it next to the sleeping high school zombie girl, and the nurse is pleasingly intrigued that the protagonist seeks her probably extraordinarily filthy tongue. As things are getting heavy, the subject of whether or not he has a girlfriend comes up. He says that he used to, but that she ended up zombified and that he had to kill her. He adds, however, that he really didn’t have to kill her, as he could have just fled from her apartment at that point, but that in her girlfriend’s zombified state she only mumbled her ex’s name, and it had seemed appropriate to behead her. Despite (or because?) this revelation, the nurse and our protagonist proceed with the sexy times. They enjoy it, and they slip into a relaxed relationship unlike the one between most survivors, who might end up betraying each other when convenient. However, he’s an introverted, romantic guy who gets immediately attached to any woman who opens up to him, even if not literally. When he later wonders whether they are a couple, the nurse is annoyed at having to explain that she simply was horny and he happened to be the only available man. Real girlfriend material.

When the pair goes back to the lucid high schooler, she learns that she’s infected, and all that has happened in the meantime. Despite this knowledge dropped on her, she feels fine and there’s lunch to prepare. The nurse and this girl fix some food while the protagonist thoroughly cleans his shotgun. The females, in an isolated situation, quickly bond over their femininity (the availability of pads, how much their body hair has grown) and particularly over how much the protagonist fails to fit the masculine ideal. Despite him having brutally murdered dozens of infected people, the rest of the time he’s a timid sort of schizophrenic, all too eager to please the women in his life. Not very attractive.

At some point the high schooler learns that the protagonist had busted his ass tirelessly to take care of her sweet high schooler ass. She bows deeply to thank him. Life-long bond achieved!

They know that their idyllic vacation can’t last much longer. Their car doesn’t have enough gas to haul them to Tokyo, they need a reliable supply of food, they need to take a bath, the protagonist needs shotgun shells (only nine remain from an initial supply of around a hundred), and as a general goal they need to get this special girl to whatever group of scientists can engineer a vaccine from her peculiarity. They decide what to steal from the cabin (for example, a single futon for the three of them). Before they leave, though, the nurse decides to write a note to apologize to the missing owners that they had had to break into the cabin, use it without permission and then steal some shit. It’s not only part of the Japanese mindset, but of the ongoing discussion of whether civilization can go back to normal, and if they can believe themselves to be decent people if they need to break all kinds of former laws in order to survive. You don’t want to avoid stealing food from a house whose zemba owners might be wandering outside, but you also don’t want to end up roaming around as a fat guy without pants and holding spades.

When they get out, the females lay on a cart leisurely while the protagonist sweats to guide it to their car. High school zombie girl shares that she really doesn’t mind if the world never goes back to normal, that she has never had so much fun nor been so happy. Oh, no. Please don’t die. The nurse, however, asks her to refrain from saying stuff like that. You have to guess at that point that the high schooler, likely still contagious but lucid, won’t have to fear about the zambos ever again, but the nurse could at any point be bitten by a random zumbo and turn into a rabid madwoman.

Throughout this relaxed stage, which I loved because I enjoy very much following the natural dynamics of characters I like, I still feared that they were relying too much on their luck in a world in which any random zomb might crash through their windows and recruit them forcefully. Apparently both the protagonist and the nurse seemingly believe the girl to be completely cured, while she likely can infect them by getting her blood in their systems. Maybe even her saliva. I was worried the author was foreshadowing this when the nurse and this girl shared a spoon.

As they drive away from safety, they fantasize about the joy of scrubbing the sweat, dirt and combinations of genital fluids from their bodies by bathing in some hot springs. Hakone, a place famous for them, is close. The GPS still works (presumably there are also living astronauts up there, although not for long), and the protagonist finds a gun store in that town. They drive there. The store is located in the deserted outskirts of the town, although you never know how many zembos are waiting inside the houses. The main characters repeat the pattern of the females staying in the car and the male venturing out with his shotgun; they don’t criticize his masculinity further during these periods. He finds the carbonized corpse of presumably the owner of the store inside, next to a sniper rifle that the protagonist grabs for himself. Further in he locates safes presumably full of shells, but he can’t even lift them. The girls have wondered close by, and they attempt to help with the safes. The high schooler lifts one as if it was nothing. When the others comment that she shouldn’t be that strong, she pretends they only imagined it. Obviously she’s still infected, and retains the zumbos’ supernatural abilities. But she ends up using her Hulk strength to pry the safe open with a crowbar. Inside they find plenty of the shells they need. However, the carbonized corpse of the fella, who also happened to be a zumb, wanders out with his mouth open. As the protagonist and the nurse switch to attack mode, the high school zombie girl approaches the other zombie, embraces him and asks him what he wants. Realistically, the protagonist, caring so much about this girl, would have dragged her out of the way as he had done in the past, but, as if he knew she would remain unharmed, the zombie seemingly just shared his despair about having turned into a carbonized corpse. The nurse, however, took this opportunity to crush the zombo’s skull. The high school girl protests, but the nurse says that despite the girl feeling some kinship for the zeds, the main characters fight for the living, so high school zombie might better reconsider her political proclivities.

Although they should have stayed around and broken into most if not all the safes, the noise has alerted the zombies in the vicinity. Our people flee in their car. Having bonded further, they open up. The high school girl says that she doesn’t fear turning again, if that’s possible, because of the little she remembers of being a zombie she felt connected with the entire horde, as if there was no such thing as loneliness, and that now that she’s back to “normal” she experiences the loneliness of the human condition as if was a cosmic horror. She wonders whether she can still be considered human. I don’t recall how the others respond to that, but in any case they talk about their past. The nurse mentions that she has, or had, a boyfriend, a nasty bad boy from some gang, who continuously cheated on her and treated her like shit. When the high schooler asks why she would date someone like that, the nurse says that she’s no saint either, so they deserved each other. She had visited the mall to flee relationship troubles, and that’s how she ended up at the mall where the protagonist met her. Additionally she mentions that she has a sister who suffers from gender dysphoria, who had been screwing both sexes liberally, including the nurse’s own boyfriend, and that she had offered to share that dick in a threesome. Given that this is a story and that these coincidences are reasonably common, I wouldn’t be surprised if her sister is the stoic loner from the subplot, although I don’t know what it would matter at this point. In any case, they place their current hopes in being able to scrape the muck from their bodies in the local hot springs. Given that they shouldn’t split up in case some zimbo wanders in, they propose, half teasingly, to bathe together. The protagonist decides that in no way he will allow himself to die before he bathes with the nurse that won’t date him, and with the high schooler.

However, the density of wandering zombies increases. They have enough trouble running the zembii over, so they have to ditch the hot springs facility they had intended to use. The high schooler protests at the nurse liberally Carmageddoning through numerous zambos: after all, the high schooler knows them to retain feelings. The nurse, annoyed, tells her that if she feels more kinship with them to that extent, she might as well get out of the car. However, they keep going. My problem with this exciting sequence is first that they should have had more sense than to try to navigate through hordes of zombies, and that no car would stand so many bodies crashing against it. Not even its headlights broke. Realistically, the car should have broken down leaving them stranded in the middle of a horde, which is why people don’t drive through hordes in zombie stories, nor tend to use cars.

The zombie density only gets worse, to an extent that the protagonist opens the side windows and blasts whoever gets close. For plenty of pages they maneuver their way to some other outskirts while pursued by dozens of zombies, but there they casually spot some shittier hot springs “shop”. They decide to stake their own existence on standing their ground on the elevated passage leading to the facility. He doesn’t want for one of the females to stay around and steal his spotlight (and potentially get killed), so he gives the high schooler his shotgun and tells them to get going, jump into the hot springs and in general get all wet for when he finally bursts in ready to shoot from his more personal shotgun. However, what the protagonist faces with a sniper rifle he handles for the first time is a stream of fast zombols. This isn’t survivable, and I thought that the protagonist had embraced that. Being the kind of man who finds meaning in providing and sacrificing for whatever female he happened to get even mildly attached to, maybe he’s made his peace with the fact that he will never get to see that sweet high schooler’s ass.

The females, seemingly having forgotten that they are living through the zombie apocalypse and that a horde is currently assaulting the facilities they are using, get naked and take a shower in preparation for jumping into the thermal waters. They complain about how much their hair has grown, and the nurse comments on the thickness of the high schooler’s armpit hair. Later, immersed in the bath, they rely on the shotgun blasts to know that the sort of unmanly dude is fighting for their survival. Civilization in a nutshell: a high-strung, half-forgotten man risking his hide to guard the border while the comfortable women inside complain about hair.

There are few things I hate more in fictional stories than characters getting involved, particularly voluntarily, in situations they know they shouldn’t be able to survive, and yet implicitly expecting to somehow get out of them as if they knew someone would Rohirrim in. Most of the times that authors include such situations, someone or something does end up saving those characters. Even worse if it’s some Deus ex machina. As our protagonist snipes through a good bunch of zeds, he thinks to himself that he’s not going to make it. When some zomb gets within punching distance baring its rotten teeth, a monster saves the protagonist, tearing apart that zombie and probably others. It seems to be a lucid, yet severely mutated zombie. It sort of resembles a beluga with long black hair, a bulging gut and extra limbs. As the befuddled protagonist stares, the monster casually swallows him almost whole; half of the protagonist’s legs still protrude from its mouth. He casually wanders into the hot springs. When the girls see him, a monster from whose mouth protrude the legs of the person who was protecting them, they should have lost their minds, but they seem barely fazed. That’s how much they care. The monster grabs the shotgun, motions the girls to follow him and trudges back out. New alpha in town, babes.

(I've exhausted the character limits. Continues on the comments.)
Profile Image for Natilin Alpaca Saurio.
1,276 reviews3 followers
May 1, 2023
4.5
Este tomo fue prácticamente de curos personajes,en especial Oda y Hiromi. Vemis como las 2 difieren mucho en como ven la vida, una formando barreras, escudandose en chistes, evitando formar grandes vinculos debido a sus vivencias del pasado, y la otra viviendo más con energias juveniles y emocionales, demostrando un poquito más sus preocupaciones e intentado ayudar a los que pueden. Pasan muchas cosas en este tomo, en especial si hablamos de lore y eso...dios, pero una cosita que me gustaría "aclarar" es: si tu periodo te duele mucho ANDÁ AL GINECÓLOGO! NO ESPERES A QUE TE DESMAYE EL DOLOR PARA IR! y si te receta pastillas anticonceptivas para ayudarte a regulsr tus hormonas y que el dolor disminuya, si te funcionan, no las dejes che, que al final es un win win(? Digo esto porque medio que quedó poco claro en las páginas, igual, es de las primeras veces( por no decir la primera, no recuerdo bien) que todos estos temas se tocan en un manga: desde la menstruación, depilación, embarazo, pelo púbico,etc etc. Sigue bastante acorde con el "realismo" que lleva la obra, irónicamente después ves...cosas. XD
Profile Image for Juan Carlos malik.
960 reviews352 followers
December 27, 2020
Okay, por donde empezar, TENGO MUCHAS DUDAS, NO SE QUE ESTA PASANDO CON ESAS COSAS AMORFAS LLENAS DE BRAZOS Y PIERNAS, SIGUEN SIENDO ZQN O METAMORFOSIS DE HUMANOS, O SE ESTÁN COMIENDO LOS ZOMBIES ENTRE SI, QUE PASAAAAAAAAAAA.

¿PARA QUE LEER I AM A HERO 15?
1. Para conocer ciertas conexiones con los otros libros.
2. El inicio esta lleno de acción como nos gusta.
3. Entra un predicamento a la mitad de el libro que dios, por que la vida es tan cruel.
4. Los sentimientos de los protagonistas se vuelven más reales.
5. El nivel de angustia, miedo, y desconcierto se vuelve más grande.

YA QUIERO RESPUESTAS.

9 DE CALIFICACIÓN, POR QUE SIENTO QUE ESTUVO ALGO FLOJO LA PARTE DEL DESARROLLO DE ESTE TOMO.
Profile Image for 47Time.
3,485 reviews95 followers
August 28, 2023
Profile Image for Paulina ෂ.
716 reviews
July 2, 2018
[4,5]
¡¡Ahhh!! Ya no puedo con la emoción que me da leer cada capítulo, cuando las cosas parecen ir por buen camino, algo tiene que suceder. Ahora la tercia está dividida y la verdad es que dudo demasiado si Oda podrá sobrevivir o la terminaremos viendo como zombie en un capítulo posterior. Además Hideo con la costilla rota no creo que sea capaz de salir a luchar y enfrentarse con los zombies, ¿será que Hiromi sea la una opción por el momento?
Profile Image for Vittorio Rainone.
2,082 reviews33 followers
August 28, 2017
Con Hideo ferito al petto, dopo un forsennato tentativo di rianimarlo che gli ha rotto qualche costola, i ragazzi si rifugiano in un love hotel per riposarsi, e Hiromi e Oda si confrontano sullo stato interessante di Oda e sul rapporto fra loro e il ragazzo. Intanto una misteriosa ed enorme creatura cresce col contributo di tutti gli zqn delle vicinanze.
Profile Image for Sascha Vennemann.
Author 60 books12 followers
December 15, 2019
Der Cliffhanger im Vorgängerband richtig gemein... Nahtlos schließt hier die erste Hälfte von Band 15 an: tolle Action, viele epische Kampf- und Landschaftspanels sowie sehenswerte Zombie-Massenszenen. In der zweiten Hälfte wird es ruhiger und persönlicher. Insbesondere an den beiden weiblichen Protagonisten wird gearbeitet und an der Dynamik des Trios gefeilt. Funktioniert alles ganz wunderbar!
Profile Image for Gustavo.
901 reviews17 followers
August 14, 2021
Este manga es uno de mis favoritos, tiene relaciones humanas muy realistas, de los mejores zombies que he visto y una historia excelente.

Me leí desde el #13 hasta el final hace unas semanas, reseña de todo el final en el tomo #22 (acá).
Profile Image for Roberto Audiffred.
64 reviews3 followers
January 9, 2021
Creo que en este volumen empieza a dar resultado el desarrollo de los personajes, que en volumenes anteriores cansaba un poco.
Profile Image for Jesus Flores.
2,590 reviews67 followers
February 23, 2024
So the wierd Zombie that kind of ate Hiro, helps the two women escape the zombies, and guide them to a truck where it expels out Hiro. They go and hide in a Motel.Hiro manages to survive.

So this one had a nice scape scene, and with a nice ending for our group.

But then

SPOILERS

..

..



4 star
Profile Image for Camilo Guerra.
1,227 reviews20 followers
April 20, 2016
Retomando el vertigo del ultimo tomo, el grupo se puede acomodar un poco,Hideo aun vive y Oda y Hiromi son las protagonistas, ahondando en situaciones de busqueda de comida, de comodidad, mientras Hideo se recupera, además de un bombazo emocional a el grupo, el cuál se veia venir en algún momento, pero aun asi nos toca los corazoncitos.

SPOILER

El que Oda este embarazada, y sus paginas, son emocionalmente magnificas y nos llevan a pensar en que algo malo va a pasar, oh si.
Profile Image for Mark.
1,284 reviews
November 13, 2016
Dikejar-kejar gerombolan zombie lalu diselamatkan oleh monster aneh yang bentuknya mengerikan. Plot twist yang unik tapi tidak menjawab pertanyaan sama sekali, mengapa sampai ada monster seperti itu dan mengapa pertumbuhannya berbeda? Sebagai cerita fantasi, OK lah masih bisa diterima. Tapi karena tidak ada penjelasan memuaskan, jelas jadi membingungkan dan membosankan.
Profile Image for Seno.
381 reviews17 followers
January 26, 2016
Apakah ZQN itu berevolusi? Kenapa bisa jadi seperti itu? Ini benar-benar jadi pertanyaan besar. Dan bagaimana nasib Oda? Duh penasaran dengan vol-16 akan seperti apa kelanjutannya nanti. Sabar sabar harus nunggu 2 atau 3 bulan lagi :D
Profile Image for Biondy.
Author 9 books235 followers
March 5, 2016
plotnya tambah kompleks.
Profile Image for Rici.
546 reviews
March 21, 2016
Unsere Helden haben eine kleine Atempause, wir bekommen mehr zu sehen von den Zombies und es bahnt sich einiges an - der nächste Band wird bestimmt wieder aufregend!
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews

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