‘Zombies! Feast’ – McCarthy, Bolton and Lorenzana (IDW )

The week is only a few days old and it’s already shaping up to be a bit of a bastard… I can’t wait for my day off on Thursday… So not a lot of time for reading big thick books, or short slim books for that matter, but plenty of time to be reading comic books instead so that’s what you’ll mostly be seeing here this week. Hope you don’t mind ;o)

I’ll pretty much read any comic that comes my way but naturally gravitate towards Deadpool’s madcap (yet slightly tragic) self-awareness, The Goon’s childish humour and masterful storytelling, anything where the hero (or heroine) carries a big sword and, most of all, zombies.

I love zombie comics. I love the way that, in the right hands, writer and artist can combine to create a dead landscape for some powerful drama to play out against. You know the series that I’m talking about, don’t you? Well, actually maybe you don’t. While ‘The Walking Dead’ is the series that caught everyone’s eye (and went on to, well… you know), there are loads of other zombie comics out there that do just as fine a job, sometimes even better. Comics like IDW’s ‘Zombies!’

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 theor 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 that you need to worry about but the monsters beside you…

  

‘Feast’ could originally be found in IDW’s ‘Zomnibus Vol 1’ (Get it? It’s like an omnibus but with, oh never mind…) but I found it as a trade collection all of it’s very own. Nothing against the ‘Zomnibus’ but that’s just the way I like it. ‘Feast’ is quite possibly the best zombie comic you’ve never heard of and deserves to have top billing all to itself.

‘Feast’ basically does everything that makes for a classic zombie tale. An explanation for the zombie outbreak? Nope, none whatsoever, just a bunch of people thrown into the thick of it and left to see how they get on. And that’s how it should be, strip away all the unnecessary plot devices and just get straight down to the business of living, dying, being eaten… and then coming back again. That’s just how a zombie apocalypse should work, just the way I like it.

The cast are exactly the sort of people you want to be reading about in a situation like this. The convicts (and their guards) are hard enough to take on all comers but messed up enough for any group dynamic to fracture under any kind of pressure. And there’s pressure, a whole load of it… Kill off the one guy who might have been able to see them through this mess (and anyone else, as and when you like) and then watch everything fold… McCarthy sets it all up to fail and it all fails in some style, with zombies being constantly poured into the mix and nothing but shit happening to people who deserve to be eaten by zombies as well as people who are no less deserving of that fate but are trying to redeem themselves before they go. This is a story that will leave you asking questions of certain characters long after you put the book down, especially as far as Mace is concerned. Just what did he do and if we knew, would we forgive him based on how he tries to help the survivors? That’s one for another post but fair play to McCarthy for making us care about a bunch of criminals.

And don’t forget the zombies… McCarthy comes very close to overloading his story with zombies but gets it just right with enough zombies to leave the ending in no doubt but also enough zombies to keep you interested in the meantime. There is also plenty for gore for the likes of me to appreciate…

The artwork is unfortunately one area where ‘Feast’ doesn’t quite hit the spot. Both Bolton and Lorenzana are great at what they do but throwing them both into the same book makes for art that contrasts just a little too much for the artwork, of the book as a whole, to be consistent. I’d have gone for one artist or the other, probably Bolton as his backdrops are suitably gloomy and atmospheric.

Apart from that, ‘Feast’ is basically a great example of how to write the (practically) perfect zombie comic. If you’ve finished ‘The Walking Dead’ and are looking for a quick story along the same lines then I would highly recommend that you pick this trade up.