text: The manga and anime series Highschool of the Dead features a diverse range of characters designed by Shōji Satō with their storyline written by Daisuke Satō. The series revolves around a pandemic that turns humans into zombies, euphemistically referred to by the main characters as  , and the story follows a group of students at Fujimi High School: Takashi Komuro, Rei Miyamoto, Saeko Busujima, Saya Takagi, and Kohta Hirano. Shizuka Marikawa, the high school's nurse, and Alice Maresato, a young girl, join the students as they fight their way to safety through the deadly streets of Japan during a worldwide catastrophic event known as the "Outbreak".
  Creation and conception
  Daisuke Sato, who has previously worked on various military genre games and manga, which include Imperial Guards, wrote the story which uses the perspective of Japanese high school students and refers to classic zombie apocalypse movies such as Dawn of the Dead. Character design was done by manga artist Shōji Satō whose previous work was mostly self-published titles in the adult genre, and this was his first major non-hentai title.