By: Chris Roberson (writer), Michael Allred (art), Laura Allred (colors), Todd Klein (letters) & Shelly Bond (editor)
The Story: Gwyn goes out on a date with a monster hunter.
What’s Good: At its core, this comic has a ton of potential as just a human relationship type of comic. Sure the main character is a zombie, but she still has hopes and aspirations and does things like goes on dates, which is the A-story in this issue. As a reader is it hard not to like Gwyn and want her to find some happiness in her kinda tragic existence. Still, you cringe when she goes on a date with Horatio the monster-hunter (to a miniature golf course of all places) because you know it probably won’t end well.
The Allreds’ art continues to be stellar. When you have art like this in a comic series, you can ride out some rough patches in the story that would be cause real heartburn with weaker art. Michael Allred has such a nice, soft line. His women are really pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way; they never look like skanks. Even the tramps don’t look like skanks. And Laura Allred’s colors are the perfect match. I love the blue/white she uses for Gwyn’s hair and the purple/pink for her skin tone. It makes it clear that she is something other than a normal human.
What’s Not So Good: A couple of things… The main problem that I’m having with this series is that there is just way too much going on and I can’t remember who some of the secondary characters are. In this issue alone, there are about six different story threads and that is just too many because the comic is only 22 pages long. I think that sort of thing really won’t matter if you’re reading this in trade, but while Vertigo does a very healthy trade business, I still think the bulk of their sales are old-fashioned single-issue comics (except for evergreen titles like Fables), so it would be nice to get the single issues to be a littler tighter.
The only other item is at the ending. Would Horatio really not notice that Gwyn is ambient temperature when they kiss? The dude is a monster-hunter after all. Of course, that might be the first panel of next month’s issue…
Conclusion: I really enjoy this series and like reading about Gwyn, but we just need to have a little trimming of the fat on this series. I’m not remotely close to dropping this title, but I wonder if it would benefit from putting some of these characters and storylines away for an arc, THEN get them back out once other items are resolved. It helps a lot that the Allreds are performing at the same high level that they have been for the last decade. They’re just awesome.
Grade: C+
-Dean Stell
Filed under: Vertigo Tagged: | Chris Roberson, Dean Stell, I, I Zombie, Laura Allred, Michael Allred, review, Shelly Bond, Todd Klein, Vertigo, Zombie #9, Zombie #9 review
