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I Am a Hero

アイアムアヒーロー(19) (ビッグコミックス)

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累計600万部突破、大ヒット作品!!!
2016年4月23日(土)、全国映画公開!!!

[キャスト]鈴木英雄/大泉洋 早狩比呂美/有村架純 藪/長澤まさみ
[監督]佐藤信介(『GANTZ』『図書館戦争』)


東京へ向かって、ふたりで旅を続ける英雄と比呂美。

巨大ZQNに追われながらも、
ふたりはなんとかピンチを切り抜け、
信頼と愛情を育む……

…が突如、神からの啓示のように比呂美に訪れた、残酷な真実。

それは、ZQNという生命と人類の行く先を知るための、
大きなヒントとなるのだが…

覚醒と惜別の最新刊!!!

203 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 15, 2016

2 people are currently reading
60 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
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
Profile Image for Tawfek.
3,822 reviews2,205 followers
January 25, 2023
wooooow wtf just happened !!
is she going to be the queen, they were looking for she went by her own free will, but is that really what she wants? or is she just sad that she killed oda san?
This is just crazy i wonder how everything will turn out in the end !
Profile Image for Jon Ureña.
Author 3 books121 followers
March 12, 2020
Three and a half stars.

This volume couldn’t have started more strange. We follow a new character, a mutated person which is just a head wearing a gas mask, on top of two spindly, mutated legs. It looks like those bizarre nightcrawlers from the videos, which might have inspired the look. It’s wandering through Barcelona of all places. As the Japanese mangas tend to do, the backgrounds are depicted in a detailed way that suggests that the mangakas themselves travelled there, shot photos and then drew them or processed the photos somehow into resembling drawings. I tell you, being Spanish myself, reading a manga produced on the other side of the world only for some of the action to take place in streets you’ve been in is fucking weird. In any case, this intelligent mutated human seems to do nothing else but wander through the city while observing the sights and the other beings he comes across, and in the process he also monologues to himself. He says that the streets are completely deserted of humans these days, and that the beings remaining are the hives, some abstract sentinel-like types that patrol the streets to keep the order, mutated beings that don’t seem to have a specific purpose in mind, and some other mutants that seem to be defective, given that they attack anyone else liberally. None of these are what we could classify as fully human nor zombies. Given that from what we have last seen of Japan there are still many zambos and some uninfected humans still roaming around, I suspect that this sequence takes place in the future after the main plot of this series has finished. It’s a glimpse into the new civilization of sorts that inherited the Earth, or that will do so when the hives spawn whatever hybrid race they are cooking. It’s very hard to empathize with the remaining intelligent beings, so I don’t like it. I like even less that the protagonists of this series couldn’t have had a decent fate if the world ended like this.

The nightcrawler-like mutated human knows that the remaining living beings operate under the unknowable designs of some intelligence. He considers himself belonging to the race that doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist (good job improving on humanity, aliens), but he ponders whether his purpose is what he’s been doing for a while: to observe and maybe report about the state of the current world. He visits many popular sites from that city, and calls it beautiful. Barcelona is indeed beautiful; too bad about the people and the mess they have made of that region. In any case, from an elevated place he sees that some gargantuan fleshy tarp is covering the Sagrada Familia, which wasn’t there before or he hadn’t noticed. He travels there through the mostly deserted streets and enters the cathedral. Inside he sees that like half of the vast open space is occupied by a few stories tall uterus, which seems to be germinating some new lifeforms. As he wonders out loud he is interrupted by one of the lucid infected people, one of those who have transcended the need to wear pants. This one is obviously modeled after Salvador Dalí [of whose personal life I just remember that he was so dissolute that when Albert Camus met him, he ended up staying away from Dalí in disgust. Camus had a good eye for people: he broke up his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre due to the latter’s support of Communism (so many Marxists amongst the French philosophers of those days, hence the post-modernist and deconstructivist garbage they came out with). There seem to be clues that Camus’ death was a KGB hit, although I haven’t looked into it]. I expected this infected Dalí to attack the nightcrawler-like creature, but at this point I guess there’s no point. Nightcrawler wonders about their purpose as intended by the alien invaders, but Dalí doesn’t believe the current situation on Earth to have been caused by an alien invasion of sorts, as in a race conquering another. He sees this as life just expanding and evolving through the universe without any great plan or conscious direction of any kind beyond whatever organization arises spontaneously, that the notion that Earth was outside of those processes was an artificial border that humans needed to believe in. After a nice chat, and maybe days later, nightcrawler walks through a beach only to realize that his spindly legs are growing leaves of sorts, and that they seem to want to grow roots in that sand somehow. Nightcrawler considers that maybe this was his purpose, to become a sort of tree and spend his days observing the changing world. He considers that as fates go there are far worse ones.

The narrative comes back to what passes for normality in this series: our schizophrenic thirty five year old protagonist and the zambo high schooler he girlfriended are enjoying some good old-fashioned fucking. She asks him timidly, in an indirect manner, if she can touch his pretty small dingus. He pushes her playfully, if referring to himself as uncle in this situation could be considered that, to be more concrete. We see that they are embracing naked in the protagonist’s former studio where he worked at, which means that this is a hallucination, a dream, or the narrative has advanced in a weird way. However, the distorted voice of an infected person interrupts them. It’s the wild nurse that the high schooler crushed in a garbage truck, and who also had a sexual relationship with the protagonist. With a realistic disdain she says something like, “having sex with each other not even a full day after I died. You are not human.” The protagonist freaks out, and then realizes that his girlfriend has turned into the bloated infected female mangaka he used to work with, who met her end back in the second volume. That bloated corpse is repeating the word penis.

The protagonist wakes up from this nightmare. He’s in the boat they landed on in the last volume. His girlfriend has disappeared from where she was resting, and the protagonist doesn’t like not having her in sight (understandable in a world where anyone could be attacked by monsters at any moment). He goes out to the deck, and the first sight he gets is of the headland a few kilometers away and the skyscraper tall hive monster that keeps eyeing the boat presumably with nefarious intentions. One thing is being pursued once by such an unholy aberration, and another is realizing that even hours later that creature remains hell-bent on reaching you. In any case, the high schooler is just sitting on a nearby bench. She looks a bit distant, off; if it’s not now, I guess at some point she would realize that she fucked up by giving her very valuable seventeen year old cute self up to this thirty five year old who often refers to himself as uncle, while grinning no less. It’s like those porn videos you can’t even beat off to because you feel bad for the girl.

We meet the fisherman, who is happily enjoying some of the food they shared with him due to this guy having saved their lives. In these stories you always expect any new character the protagonists come across to be utter scum, whether initially or later, but he seems to be a genuinely good old guy (which suggests he’ll meet a terrible fate). He’s curious about how they’ve survived so far. When he asks about their relationship, he’s embarrassed and doesn’t want to answer, thinking maybe that the high schooler would get annoyed, but the girl answers that the protagonist is her man. The fisherman grins and congratulates the protagonist for having gotten such a cute, young girlfriend despite himself being an oldish ugly guy. It’s the opposite of what I got many years ago while I was dating an ugly girl, with even women I barely knew giving me looks of “are you seriously dating this?”. But I was far more unhinged back then, something hard to contemplate even for myself; one would think the universe would have collapsed me in a logical error. The lesson I got from that relationship is that you shouldn’t date someone you don’t love nor are sexually attracted to, no matter how much you believe you have to date someone.

Although I believed that they had already reached the outskirts of Tokyo, apparently they are still like eight hours away on foot. I don’t know shit about Japanese geography. They ask the fisherman to please pilot the boat there. He’d waste gasoil, so he wants a trade: one of their firearms. He’ll give them time to think about it.

The high schooler, with a somewhat dysthymic look on her face that has gotten increasingly more common, tells the fisherman that there’s someone else in the boat. The fisherman denies it, anxious. The girl says that the unseen person is infected. The fisherman probably thinks that there’s no way he’ll be able to justify keeping an infected person, but, wary, he says that it’s his grandson. The poor kid insisted on accompanying him during one of the times he ventured from the boat for food and gasoil, and after he got infected, the old man understandably didn’t have the heart to kill him. He’s restrained in the engine room. The high schooler opens up about herself having gotten infected a couple weeks ago, but that she had gotten better, and that they planned to head to Tokyo so some medical team would examine her peculiar case with the hope of engineering a vaccine [“But it grows all over the brain.” “It does.” “Find someone else.” “There is no one else.” - serious spoilers for that game]. The fisherman, suddenly believing that his grandson would get well, becomes energized and moves to steer the boat towards Tokyo; however, he still needs that firearm. He tells the couple to feel at home, and that they can also do here what they did on that fisherman’s shack. Apparently he had been spying on them with binoculars or something, probably while jerking.

The high schooler, with her head down, says that despite her spiel she no longer believes in attempting to create a vaccine or curing herself. She reminds him that while she was lost to the infection she lost the loneliness inherent to the human condition and she had felt a part of something huge, like the energy of a crowd in a live concert. She then addresses the protagonist: when they had sex there was that hallucinatory moment in which they saw the same stuff and felt like them both were a single entity. In addition she asks him whether he saw other people, and felt as if he visited places he had never been in. He admits that was the case (he saw Kurusu and other pantless infected people), but in his case he always had to deal with delusions due to his screwed up neurology, so he discarded them as corrupted input. She reminds the protagonist that when his ex attacked him she bit him; although she had lost all her teeth, she had bit hard enough that the mark remained to this day. In addition the zumbo high schooler tells him what he dreamed a mere hour ago: both having sex and the wild nurse angrily interrupting them. As if your girlfriend being able to enter your dreams wasn’t horrifying enough, the high schooler tells him that he must be infected. That’s why not only he had undergone those hallucinations, but also why he didn’t experience any change after becoming intimate with her, beyond the wholesome feeling of love, one guesses.

Although I’ve thought that he was a lucid infected person since that infamous Deus ex machina, it really doesn’t make any goddamn sense. All the infected people we’ve known pass through an initial feverish, horrid state. Very few of them manage to recover somehow, and they don’t remember any particular details of that time beyond a swirl of emotions or flashes of hallucinations. We’ve been following the protagonist closely since the beginning; there was a single significant temporal jump when the nurse and him sheltered themselves in that camping lodge, but if he suffered the effects of the infection then, the nurse would have known. In addition he shot his toxic sperm inside the nurse, who failed to get infected. If the protagonist is really infected and the author doesn’t offer a peculiar explanation that makes sense, this is a huge plot hole.

The high schooler, somber, asks the protagonist if he heard the hive speak while it was pursuing them. The protagonist denies it. The girl says that she heard it clearly, and it said, “let’s go together. We are one.”

[I've exhausted the character limit. Continues on the comments.]
Profile Image for Camilo Guerra.
1,226 reviews20 followers
November 2, 2016
¿Como explicarlo?.

Hideo y Hiromi se escapan por los pelos de la persecución de ese zombie/mounstruo gigante, y llegan a un bote, pasamos a l otro grupo, que intenta salir del ataque de zombien en Tokyo pero...las dos tramas se unen y te dejan con un sabor épico brutal, Hideo y Hiromi están unidos mas alla de lo que parece , de lo que ellos creen saber y los otros lo saben, el sadico de los cuchillos de los tomos anteriores vuelve y le enseña a Hiromi su conexión. Y de ahi, solo podemos pasar hojas con la quijada abierta,hasta un final épico y glorioso del tomo, que nos deja con los colmillos preparados para el siguiente.
Profile Image for Sascha Vennemann.
Author 60 books12 followers
May 3, 2020
Man merkt, dass die Story mit Band 19 von "I am a Hero" langsam auf die Zielgerade einbiegt. Nach dem eher zwiespältigen Vorgängerband kann die Fortsetzung allerdings wieder komplett überzeugen und bietet einige der spektakulärsten Panels der ganzen Serie bis zu diesem Punkt. Allein der Seitenblick-Einstieg in Barcelona ist für sich genommen als kleines Hintergrund-Erklärstück so auf den Punkt und die Wirkung gezeichnet... Unfassbar gut! Nach sinnigen Fort- und Zusammenführungen weiterer Nebenhandlungen gibt es wieder einen sehr gemeinen Cliffhanger... und man fragt sich, ob Hanazawa bereits die gesamte Story zu Beginn vor sich hatte oder sie sich nebenbei erst entwickelte. Wie dem auch sei - Es bleibt wohl bis zum Ende spannend!
Profile Image for Juan Carlos malik.
958 reviews352 followers
November 11, 2020
Esto si no lo puedo creer, que pedazo de historia, que final tan brutal, que conexiones tan macabras, Kengo Hanazawa se lucio, me impresiono, DIOOOOOS NECESITO EL TOMO 20 YAAAAAAA.

¿Para qué leer I am a hero 19?

1. Por que nos muestran las características y los tipos de los ZQN.
2. Nos conecta a los protagonistas.
3. Da un giro inesperado al final.
4. Cada vez se vuelve más cruel y macabra esta historia.
5. Una gran historia que se convertirá en algunos años una clásica de la literatura Z.
Profile Image for Paulina ෂ.
716 reviews
July 11, 2018
EL MEJOR TOMO DE I AM A HERO QUE LEÍDO ¡¡Un aplauso para los giros argumentativos y la enorme capacidad de Hanazawa para crear esta gran obra!! Si buscara en internet "cómo crear un buen plot twist" me decepcionaría no encontrar este tomo. Los grandes autores esconden lo más importante a simple vista y es justo lo que ha pasado y la razón por la que voló mi cabeza en mil pedazos, nada de Deus Ex Machina; todo cobra sentido una vez es explicado y ¡esa transición entre Kurusu y Hiromi! ¡es de lo mejor que he podido ver dentro de un manga! escenas al punto que integran a aun más la historia. Además fueron reveladas tantas cosas que fue un impacto tras otro.

Para comenzar, se describe a los ZQN y sus tipos (aparentemente); las teorías sobre Hideo y el virus que estuve leyendo por ahí resultó que fueron atinadas, ahora la cuestión es: ¿Hideo se infectó al matar a su ex o fue antes? recordemos que él ya tenía alucinaciones ¿y si en verdad se trataba de esta conexión que poseen los zqn? si es así ¿cómo y por qué? No obstante, sí que me perdí con el nuevo Kurusu, yo estaba 100% segura que era el mismo de siempre pero resulta que andamos con el Kurusu 2.0 (el otro fue "derribado" a manos del clan del Nakata). Dicho sea de paso, me muero por ver la unión de los grupos (más ahora viendo como acabó el volumen y ya que se encontraron dos clanes).

Ahora sí, *mega spoiler* ¡HIROMI Y KURUSU! creo que leía esas partes de los zqn con sus conexiones y tal pero jamás me imaginé que llegara a estas dimensiones. La manera en que Hiromi se da cuenta de lo que pasa es la manera en que Kengo nos permite hacerlo. Simplemente maravilloso. Y ahora tiene sentido lo de "Yo asesiné a Oda".
Muero de ganas por continuar esto, está increíble, la historia ha ido desenvolviéndose de la manera adecuada, ya que llegas a este punto, te das cuenta que no va rápido ni lento, va al tiempo correcto y las cosas que suceden son especiales.

Una de las tantas cosas que le puedo aplaudir a Kengo es la creación de personajes (y claro, la maravillosa historia). Hacer que la gente se preocupe por los personajes, ya sea de una forma afectiva o incluso repulsiva, es difícil; si a esto le juntamos la historia, el dibujo, los escenarios, el humor, saber cómo cambiar el mood en cada escena, entre muchos otros aspectos, son cosas que no todos logran y considero que Hanazawa me ha dado justo en el clavo.
Profile Image for 47Time.
3,482 reviews95 followers
August 31, 2023
Profile Image for Roberto Audiffred.
64 reviews3 followers
July 1, 2021
Muy buen volúmen, las cosas se están poniendo emocionantes de nuevo. Varias revelaciones sorprendentes y un final conmovedor. Se nota que ya se están resolviendo los nudos de la trama y parece ser que esta serie terminará con una conclusión correcta que no deje cabos sueltos. Seguro me romperá el corazón, pero está bien.
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 Rici.
546 reviews
August 5, 2017
Das war so gut! Wir haben das Ende der Epidemie? Oder zumindest endet die Serie bald? Etwa störend finde ich noch immer die Liebesbeziehung, aber ansonsten entwickelt sich alles überraschend und spannend und ich hoffe das Ende wird zu dieser Geschichte passen.
Profile Image for Eva.
142 reviews5 followers
June 30, 2023
A este ponto as coisas já estão tão mirabolantes que quando vejo este não-Salvador-Dalí sem calças dentro da Sagrada Família a conversar com uma cabeça com pernas, com um útero gigante ali ao lado, eu só aceito.
Profile Image for Jesus Flores.
2,588 reviews69 followers
February 23, 2024
I am hero 19

The initial part with the walking zombie in Barcelona, that was weird an interesting, nice way to explain a bit more about the ZQN, the part of the two groups trying to capture each other, although interesting could have worked better in another volume, felt boring compared to the other story of Hideo and Hiromi, who are traveling to Tokyo by boat. The dreams or mind contact of Hiromi raises an interesting question, and that twist in the end, really good cliffhanger there.

4 stars
Profile Image for Miguel Lugo.
88 reviews15 followers
January 4, 2017
Si comparamos el primer tomo con este hay una gran pero muy grande diferencia tanto en la historia como en el desarrollo de los personajes, todos los tomos estaban llenos de acción pero en este tomo en especial damos un salto a lo que podría ser el final de la historia.

¿A caso los ZQN viven dentro de un sueño?, ¿a caso Hideo y Hiromi son ZQN?
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