By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragorn (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)
The Story: Having escaped the US military field compound, our gang continues their quest to reach London to do a journalistic story on the Rage virus.
What’s Good: This story just keeps trucking along, moving our gang from one tight spot to another. It doesn’t let up for a second and is really compelling and tense to read. In the last couple issues, we had seen our gang get apprehended by a US military science group that was set up to study the Rage virus and then escape, but not before the young boy traveling with them loses his life.
Now our gang is thrown right back into the frying pan after accidentally getting onto a train that is LOADED with the infected which leads to a classic comic book cliffhanger, “Yes, we can do that, but one of us will have to stay behind” – situation. When you see a cliff-hanger like that in the X-Men, you just laugh it off and know that before any heroic sacrifices happen in next month’s issue, some other superpowered character will pop out of a time warp to save the day or it will turn out that the whole thing was a training exercise in the Danger Room. That isn’t going to happen in 28 Days Later, so you know that something grim might happen next month.
This issue also gave us a little bit of levity and I think that was needed. After being just dark, dark, dark for 12 issues, we kinda needed a break and we get it when the gang stumbles upon an Aston Martin sports car. Our American journalist is insistent that HE will drive, only to get in on the wrong side of the car and lose the driving pleasure to someone else. Ha!
The art is again very useful for this type of story. It isn’t be best art that I’ve ever seen, but it handles both the talking heads and the action scenes pretty well and never leaves us confused about what is going on. I’m also impressed that this title has changed artists several times now without it being blindingly obvious, so a tip of the cap to editorial control is probably in order.
What’s Not So Good: The overall story for this is starting to really come apart in my mind. We began with an American journalist who wanted to get into London to do on-the-spot reporting on the Rage virus and to that end he recruited Selena (the heroine from the first 28 Days movie) to guide his team in. Okay… I’ll buy that there are journalists nutty enough to want to do this and while I can’t imagine that you could really talk Selena into going back onto the island of Britain, if Ripley was willing to go along with the Colonial Marines in Aliens I can make the leap of fictional disbelief that Selena was willing to go.
However, since the gang set out, nothing has gone according to plan, the team is down to 3: Selena, the journalist and one other team member who was been rendered blind in an accident. Yet, they are still trying to reach London? WTF? It is just getting to be a little much for my brain to handle because it is just an asinine quest at this point. Kudos to the creators who realized that every other story about zombie apocalypses are about people trying to get OUT, so what if you told a story about people trying to get IN? Well, they’ve kinda told the story of how that works and I’m just not buying that these humans would keep pushing forward.
Conclusion: A fun and enjoyable series, that is starting to strain credulity.
Grade: C+
– Dean Stell