Zombie Comics: 30 Days of Night, Eclipse of the Undead - A Review

30 Days of Night: Spreading the Disease

So, I mentioned that I had been looking for good titles to get involved with and wasn't coming across too many. Most of the ones in which I would normally be interested were mini-series, such as Dr. Strange, so I went ahead and grabbed me some zombie comics.

Now, I was mainly interested in Deadworld -- because it's the standard in zombie comics and has been since the 1980s -- but it has a bi-monthly schedule to which it has never stuck, so I picked up a few other titles along the way. 

I was a little overwhelmed at first because there were several zombie titles to choose from, mostly from independent companies, but by the time I'd placed my orders, zombie comics literally exploded across all the companies! Marvel, DC, nearly every indie publisher -- every last one of them has at least one zombie-based title either already on the market or soon-to-be-released. Pretty disappointing, really.

At any rate, the first two I got are both from IDW (publishers of Doomed -- a great horror anthology magazine) and I'll give you the rundown on them:

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS]:

Zombies! Eclipse of the Undead is a pretty... "street-level" zombie rag with sub-standard writing and kick-ass artwork. My subscription started with issue #3 and it has no "story so far" preview, so I have no idea what went on before, but it apparently follows some thugs in a world recently overrun by zombies. None of the characters are very interesting to me -- they're all hardened, "tough-as-nails" bad-asses -- and the few that I might have found interesting are dead before the end of book (I'm not ruining anything for you -- you pretty much see it all coming from a mile away).

Of course, I'm prejudiced, because I loathe the "gangsta" culture and what it's done to society and, although this book doesn't glorify it, it does focus on it -- meaning to say that, in a book full of anti-heroes, the guys with the guns become the ones you look up to. Still, the artwork alone is worth the price of admission.

30 Days of Night: Spreading the Disease. Okay, this is a frigging zombie comic! A ZAAAWWMBIE comic! 

Actually, they're vampires in Alaska during the solstice or whatever it is that causes the 30 days of darkness once a year. This book is a masterpiece you can look forward to seeing in a collected version sometime in the future, I'm certain. The writing is crisp and tight with a heavily-developed storyline and the artwork is the best I've seen since Vince Locke's! In fact, much like Locke's work, it can be a bit hard to follow at times due to its sketchy, ragged nature -- which, of course, serves to enhance the mood and story, and so it's no real problem. 

Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it!

I'll cover the other books I got in another post, cuz they aren't zombie related... which is quickly becoming the thing what makes them stand out...