Zombie #1 (of 4)

Written by Mike Raicht

Art & Cover by Kyle Hotz

 

Mercy, mercy! Comics Industry, I beg you: Please, please, please spare us from more zombie comics. I just can't take it any more. Every week, there's at least one new comic about the walking/living/returning dead seeking human flesh to eat. The genre has exploded so big and so fast that they rival superheroes for genre ubiquity (though as I’ve pointed out before, superheroes so dominate the medium that it’s hard to even consider them their own genre rather than simply “normal comics,” at least at this point).

 

It's somewhat surprising to see Marvel jumping into the overcrowded field of zombie comics at this late stage, since Image and the indies have been raking dough in on zombie comics for so many years already but, on the other hand, Marvel might not have even realized how much incredibly successful zombie comics can be. Perhaps it took the unexpected success of their weird Ultimate Fantastic Four spin-off Marvel Zombies (the hardcover collection of which just recently sold out) to realize how much life there was in the undead.

 

In that context, another Marvel zombie comic, particularly one on the company's under-utilized mature readers Max label makes a certain amount of sense, but the prosaically titled Zombie seems like too little too late.

 

The same lack of imagination that went into its title (which is sort of like launching a Western comic called Western or naming their next new superhero comic simply Superhero) is on display within the first issue itself.

 

Writer Micke Raicht attempts to give the stale formula a bit of a twist by mashing it up with a heist-type story, but it's not much of a twist, and certainly not enough to forgive all the tired repeats of imagery and predicaments.

 

Our hero is bank employee Simon Garth, who's been kidnapped as part of a bank robbery. Unfortunately for the robbers, the zombie apocalypse has started mid-robbery, and the police cars, soldiers and people in hazmat suits don’t seem interested in chasing them over a few bags of money. They've got much bigger problems on their minds (and attempting to eat their brains). [Editor’s Note: Simon Garth is an old-school Marvel character that was actually a zombie himself that was controlled by a magic amulet. Obviously he’s here in name only.]

 

When things go south as they inevitably do during zombie apocalypsi, the surviving hostages and robbers make a run for it on foot, eventually finding themselves besieged by an army of the walking dead like in, well, like in every single zombie comic book or movie ever made. As a cliffhanger ending, Raicht probably couldn't have found a less interesting way to end the first issue.

 

The closest thing the book has to a saving grace is the art, by Kyle Hotz, who has plenty of horror experience from his time at Dark Horse. His character designs have a nervous, cartoony edge to them, and his dead are fine, but they're not cool enough to stand out in the field.

 

Oh well. There's always Marvel Zombies 2 to look forward to, I supposed.

 

Rating – 3