High School of the Dead Act 1: Guns, Tits and Zombies

Post Author: Bob

Hey Narutards, I know all of you are eagerly waiting for the next Naruto chapter, but even Kishi and Shonen Jump need a break over the winter holidays, so this this week I thought I’d try something new and take a peek at one of the mangas picked up last year: High School of the Dead. Now HSotD is not your traditional shonen genre manga, the heroes/heroines don’t have super powers and there certainly aren’t any ninjas or shinigamis. However, it’s got the key ingredients to make it a hit series: lots of guns and inventive weaponery, hordes of ugly zombies to fight, and hot girls with big… eyes. Go to mangareader to view this manga and check for new releases.

Before I go any further, I’ll give a quick background and synopsis of what High School of the Dead is about:

The manga is drawn by Satou Shouji and written by Satou Daisuke. Shouji is a relatively new mangaka, but has worked on Excel Saga and published his own doujinshis in the past. His drawing style is very unique and attractive, not to mention the large servings of fanservice Shouji always offers in his works. The story of HSotD takes place in Japan where a worldwide outbreak has occurred that turns the recently deceased into flesh-eating zombies if they are infected. At a highschool, Takashi Komuro and a group of students and staff must fight their way out to survive. It’s a classic zombie apocalypse survival story with a good dose of humor and fanservice thrown in to lighten up the mood between the zombie decapitations and whatnot.

Here’s some facts about this particular outbreak:

1. In the manga, the zombies are referred to as “Them.” I don’t know why, it’s not like ‘zombie’ is copywritten or anything, so I’m going to stick to calling them zombies.

2. Nobody knows what caused the outbreak, but the infection is spread through being bitten by zombies. Depending on the initial size of infection, it could take less than a minute for someone to turn into a mindless zombie.

3. The zombies’ sole object is to consume living flesh and they find their prey through heat and sound.

4. Zombies are slow moving, but are fast to lunge. They have incredible strength and can only be killed through destruction of the brain.

Chapter 1 introduces us to the central protagonist and soon-to-be leader of the high school survivors, Takashi Komuro. Takashi isn’t your typical gung-ho let’s go hero, in fact when he’s first introduced he seems indecisive and lazy, like the type of guy who would rather let life flow by without a care in the world. But they say leaders are born in the midst of chaos, and Takashi will be forced to make some hard choices whether he likes it or not. At the beginning of the story, Takashi has barricaded himself with schoolmates Rei Miyamoto and Hisashi Igou. Poor Takashi has had a crush on Rei ever since they were little but has yet made a move. Not surprisingly, Rei has found herself a boyfriend in Hisashi who is everything Takashi isn’t, lol. It’s clear from the manga that Hisashi is a natural leader as it was his wise decisions that helped all three of them survive the zombie outbreak so far. When everyone else was trampling over each other to escape the school at the first sign of danger, Hisashi’s first course of action was to grab weapons and try to contact the police. But as a protagonist Hisashi is just too perfect, and so as in any good zombie thriller, he’s infected and turns into a zombie which our more flawed hero Takashi has no qualms dispatching.

As hot as she is, I have to say that Rei really got on my nerves in this chapter. As demonstrated in this chapter, she is utterly devoted to Hisashi as if her life dependent on him. It’s even stated that she even held herself back one year to be in the same class as him… creepy. In a way, she reminds me a lot of what Sakura Haruno was like back in the first part of Naruto; the way she is utterly dependent on others, desperate for their approval makes for a poor characteristic for a lead heroine. I think what happened at the end of this chapter summed her up pretty well.   Even though Takashi killed the zombified Hisashi for their sake, Rei was quick to blame the whole thing on Takashi. She even says she wants to become a zombie to be together with her dead boyfriend. When Takashi tries to calm her down, she turns the blame on him. It’s not until Takashi decides to leave her and fight the zombies by himself that she reverses herself and begs hims to stay as she fears being alone. Takashi must have been overjoyed to here his crush plead to him like that, but at the same time he must also be disgusted that it took a zombie apocalypse and a dead friend for him to give him the opportunity to become closer to Rei in her moment of weakness. Thankfully, both Rei and Takashi’s personalities improve in subsequent chapters and they become reliable and resourceful zombie killers.

Next chapter, we’ll get to meet a few more survivors to round out the group. High School of the Dead was originally published back in 2007 in Monthly Dragon Age, but it’s only 28 chapters have been released so far. The main cause is because the mangaka likes to take really looooong breaks, lol.