Hello everyone. This week’s review kicks off a month of horror-themed manga reviews in honor of it being October. We shamble out of the gate by covering Highschool of the Dead, written by Daisuke Sato and illustrated by Shoji Sato. Highschool of the Dead follows a group of high school students that find themselves right smack dab in the middle of a good old zombie apocalypse.
We start the story with the zombie apocalypse having already broken out and we find the female protagonist of the series, Rei Miyamoto, trying to fight a zombie, but she foolishly attacks the zombie’s torso, allowing it to grab her weapon and knock her to the ground. Before the zombie can begin feasting on her brains, one of her friends, Hisashi Igo, along with our male protagonist, Takashi Komuro, save her from the zombie with Hisashi bashing its brains in with a bat.
Aw, what the hell man?! You totally brainblocked me, dude!
Takashi, Hisashi, and Rei make their way to the roof of their school, and they look down at the school grounds below, taken back by the carnage going on. We are then treated to a brief montage of different students getting turned into zombie food. After Takashi and the others successfully build a barricade on the roof, they try calling the police, only to hear a message that the lines are all busy at the moment.
The story then has a flashback to just two hours prior, before the outbreak reached the school. It is in this flashback that we learn that Rei and Takashi were childhood friends and Rei made a promise with Takashi to eventually get married together, but Rei ends up going out with Hisashi after Takashi accidentally says something that makes her mad. On the day the outbreak occurred, Takashi was late to class, so he decided to ditch class by hiding on the school’s roof. It is while on the roof that Takashi witnesses the outbreak reaching the school in the form of a single zombie walking up to the school’s gates and biting the arm of one of the teachers that confront it. The teacher quickly dies from blood loss, but almost just as quickly reanimates as a zombie and bites one of the other teachers in the neck.
Why do the hot ones always die first?
As a result, Takashi rushes into his classroom and grabs Rei by her arm while telling her to come with him. Rei refuses to and Hisashi confronts Takashi about what he is doing. Takashi tells Hisashi about what he saw happen at the front gate. Rei interrupts Takashi’s and Hisashi’s conversation by demanding that Takashi explains himself. Takashi responds by slapping her across the face.
Did you not see that we were having a conversation, woman?
Hisashi agrees to take Rei with Takashi and leave, and after they arm themselves with weapons the school’s PA system turns on with the principal informing the rest of the students of what has happened. At the same time, zombies break into the principal’s office and the zombies kill the principal while the intercom was turned on. This induces a mass hysteria among the students, who start fighting and running over each other just to escape their classrooms. During the chaos, we are introduced to two more members of the main cast, Saya Takagi, the beautiful daughter of a politician, and Kota Hirano, an often bullied gun otaku.
Due to the large amount of panicking students in the main building, Hisashi, Rei, and Takashi try to leave through the administration building, however, they run across their first zombie, and in their fight with it, Hisashi is bitten on the arm.
Well, we know where this is going . . .
We eventually catch up to before the flashback began, and after the flashback ends, we see that Hisashi is beginning to turn into one of “them”, his term for the zombies, deciding to call them that as they weren’t in a film or game, so he felt it didn’t feel right to call them zombies. As Hisashi slowly succumbs to his bite, he asks Takashi to make sure he doesn’t revive as a zombie.
. . . and I totally called it!
The main cast is rounded out by Shizuka Marikawa, the school’s curvy 26-year old nurse and Saeko Busujima, a member of the school’s kendo club. The main cast escapes from the school and the rest of the story so far has them trying to stay alive against “them” while also encountering other survivors, both good and bad, as well as trying to remain mentally sane.
Highschool of the Dead currently has 29 chapters bound in 7 tankobon volumes and is published in the West by Yen Press. The series also spawned a 12 episode long anime.
This is an interesting series that gives us another look at the popular zombie apocalypse genre. There is a good amount of gore, but that is to be expected as it is about a zombie apocalypse. The fanservice presented in the series can be a little odd when juxtaposed next to the gore, but it is something that can be overlooked. I have to say that if you like zombies, you should give Highschool of the Dead a look.