By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragon (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)
The Story: Our band finally makes it to London, but will it be what they expect?
What’s Good: Last month I was getting a little sour on 28 Days because I thought that the quest to reach London was getting so horrific that I just couldn’t imagine any group hanging in there. Sane people would walk away and say, “No thanks! Too hard!”
I should be a comics editor (LOL) because as if the creative team read my mind, they change things up in a big way in this issue. First, let’s get a SPOILER WARNING out here…
The big news in this issue is the death of a central character. In some ways I feel a little silly saying “central” character because how attached can you really be to a character in an comics series that is only up to issue #14??? Well, it turns out that you see how attached you are when you see a final scene that is as well handled as this one. The death is meaningful and is managed in a very touching manner. I wish Second Coming had given Nightcrawler as good of a final scene as this.
In other developments, our survivors reach London. The comic is going to get very obvious comparisons to The Walking Dead and those comparisons will not stop because of the events of this issue. I mean that mostly in a good way. Not only are stories like 28 Days about the horror of being chased by zombies (or the “infected”), they are about the complete breakdown of human society and seeing what sorts of barbaric systems the less altruistic survivors will make up. So, much like the really awful things in TWD come via the other humans, we start to see that here in downtown London. It is a very timely change of gears for this series and I’m interested to see how the creative team will progress this story without making 28 Days into a TWD-clone (assuming that they are very aware of TWD).
We get an art change for this issue and I like it. On one hand, the realism is dialed back a notch and that can cause issues with a gritty series like this, but on the other hand I really like the style and thought it worked nicely.
What’s Not So Good: I only have one serious complaint with this issue. There is a scene where the blind character in the party (wearing a blindfold to boot) has to execute a button-pushing action on a train that seems a little implausible for someone who cannot see. Maybe I didn’t read it right, but it seemed fishy to me.
The only other possible negative is that this series will need to be careful not to become a clone of TWD. The initial foray into “the humans are the REAL enemy” seems pretty different than anything TWD has tossed at us, so I’m optimistic on this front. I’m mostly tossing this out as a warning because this series has a LOT of potential.
Conclusion: This series shifted gears at just the right time to keep things fresh. I’m now very interested to see what’s in store for the next couple of story arcs!
Grade: B
– Dean Stell