Bogus Dead

by Jerome Gaynor (Editor), John Connolly (Writer), Leela Corman (Writer)

The Living Dead, (aka "Zombies") have begun to rise from the dead and violently and indiscriminately attack and eat the living. Within weeks, society has collapsed entirely. Small groups of human beings survive: holed-up in schools, hospitals, and shopping malls, desperately fighting to stay alive. Only a few things are known about these "Zombies": -They desperately crave the flesh and brains of the living. -They may only be killed by destroying their brains, via a bullet, incineration, or other extreme trauma. -They possess only a rudimentary intelligence, and seem to operate on instinct and very dim memories of their prior life. -Any person who dies will become a zombie within hours of their death. Those bitten by a zombie will become ill and eventually become zombies as well. 42 cartoonists from around the world have come together in 144 pages of raw, black & white comix, to describe this terrific sequence of events.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Horror, Zombies, Anthologies

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jerome Gaynor (ed.), Bogus Dead (Alternative Comics, 2002)

I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Bogus Dead for a few years now, so when I saw one at my local Half Price Books a couple of days ago, I snapped it up. (My library's catalog still swears they have a copy, but no one seems to be able to find it. This is not an uncommon thing with my library.) It's been long enough that I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I loved the idea—a bunch of graphic novelists giving short-short takes on the zombie phenomenon. And in some cases, I love the execution. You have to expect with anthologies that there's going to be some variation in the quality of the submissions, and such is the case here, but the best of them are truly wonderful. You'll never see bad work from Kevin Huizenga, for example, and Ariel Bordeaux turns in a piece that's all kinds of fun. If the entire book had been as good as those, it would have been a shoo-in for my best reads of the year. They're not, of course, but there's nothing here that's out-and-out bad. Zombie otaku will probably nitpick at some of the pieces of canon that get shoved to the side, especially in the opening story, but it's all in good fun. ***

[Chris Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great idea for a book, with a lot of very clever and fun interpretations of the homework: watch Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, and Day of the Dead, then create a short comic. 43 different artists participated, and what creativity! Lots of gore, of course, along with a heavy dose of delightful cynicism. It has made me look up more work by Tom Hart, Leela Corman, Graham Annable, Ariel Bordeaux, and Jerome Gaynor. Kudos!

[Brandi Rae Fong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really do love my zombie things...fun book of short zombie themed comics.

[Zanne]

9.95