See the Mouseachu! Oh, and his flunkie. You know, that pinto guy

I've been reading a few manga to pass the time. Some are really bad, some fairly cookie cutter, and then there's a few that are some of the best things I've read in a long time. The latter ones are the ones that I want copies on my bookshelf as proof of what counts as good manga. Unfortunately, the ones I really want are still not seeing distribution in the states. Still, I felt like posting a few to give you an idea of my tastes.

I Am A Hero
I Am A Hero centers on an assistant comic artist for a prominent manga author. He wants to get somewhere in his life, but he can't and, what's worse, he suffers from paranoid delusions. Monsters comes to him at night that he knows can't exist, but still haunt him as he creates makeshift warding circles out of his favorite things and sleeps within it. And then one day an infestation starts and life unknowingly and slowly reacts to it.

What makes me love this series isn't the zero to hero plot, but the ultra-realist idea of a desensitized society that can not understand an unfathomable crisis when it finally hits. Decades of viral media and attempts to one-up one shock attempt after another has made a generation of people that can not actually see a real problem when it actually hits. Only the paranoid protagonist Hideo Suzuki seems to understand that something is wrong and only when he realizes that this delusion is real and that he has to single-handedly kill his own lover-turned-zombie in the process.

What also makes this series for me is the Tarantino-like dialogue where the conversations are meaningless with the plot but are genuinely amusing.


I was planning on talking about a few more, but I obviously have not been keeping up on this post since I worked on this almost a week ago. Still, I do feel like mentioning that this series is amazing.