You may recognize HERO as one of the creators behind Horimiya, and for some readers, that will be enough to merit picking this up. But Ako and Bambi's first volume stands on its own two feet even without that endorsement, and it is strikingly different from its more famous sibling in some very meaningful ways. The most important is that it's not, at this point, a straight romance, or a romance at all, although there are some hints that it could go in that direction later. Instead, it's a story about two people trying to figure things out meeting each other in a very unusual way: he's a writer, and she appears to be a ghost.

Ako and Bambi meet when Bambi moves into a haunted apartment building. Bambi won a new writers' prize recently, but he's rapidly learning that there's nothing glamorous about his new career. His editor tells him that there weren't many submissions for the prize he won, and when the story opens, he's just learned that his series has been canceled. He's offered the chance to write short stories, but Bambi's very much at a loss, and his creative well is looking a little dry to him. Part of the problem is that he's writing horror, which isn't a genre he likes very much, and he's not sure how to get more inspiration to start something new.

Enter Ako. When Bambi rented his impressively cheap apartment, he got a deal because he was told that it was haunted – a woman had committed suicide in the bathtub in the recent past. When Ako appears behind him, Bambi at first thinks that's who she is, but the high school girl corrects him: she's met the suicide ghost, but she's a different ghost. At some point she just drifted into the apartment and chatted with a woman in the bathtub, who later left to seek revenge on the man she blames her death on, leaving Ako to haunt the apartment alone. The thing is, Ako's not sure how she died or how she got to Bambi's apartment. All she knows is that she is dead and that she vanishes each morning with the sun.

Bambi is willing to accept this at face value at first, but things soon become more complicated when a living high school girl named Ako in the same uniform appears. Suddenly Ghost Ako is looking like she may not know the whole story of her existence, and Bambi, while he's gotten permission from the ghost to base a character off of her, is beginning to wonder about the truth. This would be fine, but Hero takes it up another notch when it comes to why Bambi and Ghost Ako can communicate in the first place: there may very well be a story about bullying lurking underneath everything else.

Bambi, we learn, dropped out of high school for unknown reasons, while a comment made by class mean girls to Ako implies that she attempted suicide at some point, or at least self-harmed to the point where that rumor began to spread. This begins to lead to the possibility that Ghost Ako is a piece of Ako that she “killed.” As Bambi notes, Ghost Ako has a different hairstyle and doesn't wear glasses (although she attempts to push them up at times, implying that she's wearing contacts and isn't used to them), and she gives off a sunnier impression, even if her words and personality don't necessarily live up to that look. When compared with Ako's hesitant demeanor, hanging hair, and glasses, it seems clear that Ako went through some major changes. Everything about her screams, “Don't notice me!” in a way that feels like self-defense, especially when we factor in the way girls in her class treat her. Meanwhile, we don't know what caused Bambi to drop out, but his interactions with a former classmate show him acting very uncomfortable, and the fact that he's more or less a shut-in when we meet him could be more than a choice; Bambi, like Ako, may be dealing with painful social situations in his past that have driven him to become a metaphorical ghost whose voice only exists on paper.

It's too early to tell how much, if any, of this is real. HERO does a remarkably good job of leaving us breadcrumbs to follow, allowing readers to take what's on the page and run with it, while still keeping the plot more in slice-of-life territory than a full-out mystery. The use of a four-panel style works surprisingly well here, with each strip leading smoothly into the next rather than feeling like one-off jokes or plot threads, which can happen easily with the format. The art is mostly in sepia tones with blue accents, and once you get used to it, it's very effective, giving the impression of a faded world not quite our own.

Ako and Bambi's first volume is slim but still feels like a full book's worth of story. It's playing its cards close, but that makes it feel more imperative to read the next volume. If you like a mild mystery with dark undertones and a supernatural component, this is worth checking out.