An event of nightmarish proportions has begun! The dead are walking the Earth and tearing the living limb from limb in an endless pursuit to quench their insatiable hunger for flesh. Yet not all killers are undead. Eight of the country's most notorious murderers are being transferred across state when their bus enters a town overrun with feasting corpses! Now the town's remaining survivors find themselves fighting a battle on two sides. Five innocents, countless zombies, eight killers and a wide variety of blunt instruments whether they make it out or not, it promises to be very bloody and incredibly gruesome! In the end, it's not the nightmare outside you need to worry about but the monsters beside you.
The first of a two-part series of Zombies! and a prequel to Eclipse of the Undead and whereas the art is a little more on the clunky side of the two, I think the story holds more weight as the world begins to fall apart. We have a federal marshall and a few prison guards transporting some of the worst of the worst between penitentiaries as the beginnings of the ZomPoc start around them.
A bus accident, a chain gang, and one gore-soaked little girl later, the convicts and the surviving guards are on the run from the hordes of the undead. What happens after is what you expect: betrayal, chaos, and a lot of ripped and devoured flesh.
***Parental Warning***: There is sex and gore in this one, but not as bad as in the sequel.
I have to admit that I wasn't expecting to like this book, and I didn't for the majority of the time. Fitting with the dark tone, the graphics are dark, and because it is so action-oriented, the narrative is a bit harder to trace out sometimes. The action moves quickly between the panels, so there were a few times that I was lost. But there are some interesting ideas here about innocence and atonement. Also, there is a moment of self-sacrifice that I really liked
The art switches between two artists(or groups of artists) throughout the book. The first artist(s) are incredible, it's some of the coolest graphic novel art I've ever seen. The second artist(s) are mediocre. It goes from semi-realist with an extremely dark tone to badly drawn cartoons with garish colors. Plot-wise it's nothing particularly new to the zombie genre, but you get some decent dialogue and plenty of skull smashing (which is probably why anyone would read a zombie graphic novel anyways). I just wish they'd stuck with the first artist(s) the whole way through.