Miles’ Book
Everybody’s Dead #3
Written by Brian Lynch
Art by Dave Crosland
IDW, 2008
I think Brian Lynch might have read Faith Erin Hicks’ Zombies Calling and said, “Bitch beat me to it. Fuck it. I’m still gunna do it anyway.” In case you haven’t read Zombies Calling, or our review of it, it’s about a university infested with zombies and a group of friends who try to stop it, and so is Everybody’s Dead.
To be fair, that’s basically where the similarities end. Except for the high level of self-awareness and zombies-as-comedy elements, the differences in tone and art are large. While I’d say that Zombies Calling is the better of the two, I acknowledge that Zombies Calling was released as a single edition manga, which is generally a more satisfying read than a 22-page comic.
But I digress. Everybody’s Dead focuses on a group of fraternity brothers who have been thrust into this undead apocalypse. What follows is a madcap, dark humour, zombie epic. Some characters have already fallen to the zombies, some are just smoking up, some are just trying to mack on a hotty, some are actually doing something about it. What I like about this is that a lot of characters aren’t doing anything. While I’d like to think of myself as the kind of man who would lead my friends into battle against a horde of zombies, the reality is that I would probably react with a lot of denial, then be eaten for my stupidity.
Oddly enough, Everybody’s Dead has the same basic problem as the titan of all zombie books on the shelves, The Walking Dead. While I like The Walking Dead a lot, there have been phases of the book where there are too many characters to keep track of. There are ten central characters to this story. That might not sound like a lot, but it is when you’re just starting a narrative. It becomes hard to know anyone because you only get to spend a brief amount of time with them. Since most of the characters are stereotypes created to move the plot and jokes anyway, it doesn’t really matter. It’s in line with both the comedy and the horror genre in that respect.
The art is good. This is the kind of art that Proof needed. The best thing about Crosland is that while his style is exaggerated style, he can be very subtle. His best moment is when a character named Westerberg goes to hit a trio of zombies with a shovel but then realizes they are children. He manages to mix the fear and horror within Westerberg, but still keep it a comic moment. And that can’t be easy to pull off.
So, ultimately it’s worth checking out if you haven’t already checked out of the zombie crazy that has enveloped comics over the last three years.
Isaac’s Book
Booster Gold #9
Written by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz
Penciled art by Dan Jurgens
Finished art by Norm Rapmund
DC Comics, 2008
In this story arc, with the help of some fancy time travelling, the Blue Beetle is alive and hanging out with Booster Gold. Unfortunately, this creates one of them “time paradoxes” so everything is in a rotten state when the old Blue and Gold team return to the future.
Yes, it’s Back to the Future 2.
But this has left many fans wondering about what else would have changed in this alternate timeline: what happened with the other events of Infinite Crisis, when Blue Beetle originally died, when this paradox is created?
I was mostly content to sit back and read the story I was given, happy to have Blue Beetle hanging around, even if it didn’t quite work time wise.
Clearly, I should have had more faith in Johns (and Katz I guess, but I’ve never read him outside of the Booster Gold series, so I don’t know how much is him and how much is time tested Geoff Johns) because with just a few short allusions in a characters dialogue we’re all caught up. Even some stuff that I had a problem with during Infinite Crisis is dealt with i.e. Max Lord being a fully human evil guy, as opposed to a morally ambiguous cyborg.
I’m sorry to go on about this, I’m just really impressed at how the writers here have addressed story concerns by the fans, and it shows these guys are actually listening. Or, if they aren’t listening, then they’ve got really good instincts about what we want, which amounts to about the same thing.
That’s not to say that this issue is all about restoring a proper sense of continuity for the series, it’s really a non stop adventure, full of all the cheesy “wow” moments that made the Sinestro Corps war in Green Lantern so good.
Like having Belle Reve Prison converted into an ever morphing container for Mister Miracle; the Justice League International boom tubing into Brother I to fight Max Lord, his OMAC’s, a mind controlled Superman, and the Checkmate organization; Guy Gardner fighting with a giant bowling ball construct; and of course Batman shredding off his Checkmate disguise when everyone thinks he’s dead.
Even though this team of heroes have saved the day, the world is in a much darker place than it is in the correct timeline, and we can see the lessons Booster will have to face about personal responsibility, and trying to “fix” everything bad that has happened down the years, the kind of stuff you get with those big universe busting time traveling crossovers with Parallax, Extant, and Monarch- familiar territory for Dan Jurgens (the penciller here), the man who wrote Zero Hour, and created Booster Gold.
The big problem with this issue is the same that you may have with this review. If you don’t know that Blue Beetle was killed at the beginning of Infinite Crisis (and what’s Infinite Crisis?!?), or who the Time Stealers are (from earlier issues of this series), or that a Green Lantern’s power ring needs to recharge every day, or just about anything that’s referenced all throughout this comic, this issue isn’t going to help you out there. This is an awesome comic, but it’s really for the fans out there.
