By: Chris Roberson (writer), Michael Allred (artist), Laura Allred (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor), & Shelly Bond (editor)
The Story: The big threat is beginning to show itself. What impact will this have on our main characters?
Five Things:
1. Interesting plot development for Gwyn. – Even though I Zombie has an ensemble cast, Gwyn is the main character. I was a eager to see Gwyn get taken back to Dead President headquarters (because surely that place held some answers about what is going on with all these monsters), but it’s still interesting to see her and Horatio on the run. This will probably lead to some answers too, just not the ones we thought we were going to get.
2. Love, love, LOVE Laura Allred’s colors. – Honestly, good colorists don’t get enough credit. Laura Allred’s colors are the glue that holds this series together. Of course, some of the power in her colors comes from things like the way Gwyn’s RED dress pops off an otherwise grey page. But, she’s got some other clever tricks too. Love the white/grey hair color for Gwyn and the slightly purplish hue to her skin; no normal humans are these colors and it helps to set her apart. I also love the vampire chick’s combination of green sweatshirt + red hair. Again…the red hair (with a little orange) is a color that you’d never see on a living human. You can’t look at these characters and think they are normal. Another thing that catches my eye about Ms. Allred’s coloring is that she doesn’t add highlights (which I HATE), she adds shadow. It sounds simple, but I surely don’t see other colorists working this way and it is very effective.
3. Great cover. – It seems like the only place to get decent covers anymore is on creator-owned books. I LOVE the way your eye is drawn to the object of interest (Gwyn) on this cover.
4. Series has progressed a LOT since issue #1. – One great thing about binding comics is that you periodically go back through your old stuff to prep them for binding. I was ripping up my Northlanders issues and came across the 5-page promo for issue #1 of I Zombie. Remember how this series started: Gwyn had to eat a brain to stave off becoming a shambling zombie, but also got some of the brain’s memories which would haunt her until she solved some mystery. There was NONE of the complexity that this series currently has. I honestly wonder if Roberson and Allred first pitched this as a miniseries and when it had some success, they expanded it because the whole shtick of doing things commanded by the eaten brain is gone.
5. A little hard to tell what this issue is about. – Well, I’ve said all nice things about this issue and that’s going to make you wonder why I’m not giving it an “A” below, so some explanation is in order. The “problem” is a typical one for I Zombie: too many characters/plots. I really struggled with what to write for “The Story” at the beginning of this review and that’s kinda telling (mind you that I’ve written a 1-2 sentence description of at least one comic per day for 3 years). I guess there are ways that I can see distant connections between the various plot threads and how I expect them to wind back together, but some of it might just be extra. I LIKE the grandfather in the chimpanzee body and I LIKE Spot’s new “boyfriend”, but are those characters so vital to the story that it’s worth making the series more complex? I assume that one or all of these characters is going to be involved in saving Spot from Amon, but could another character do that? Could Horatio and Gwyn save him? Could the Dead Presidents/Fossors do it? Those are “must have” characters, the grandfather is not. I think this is a potentially great series, but it is a tad too complex and busy.
Conclusion: You won’t find comics that are much more pleasant to look at than I Zombie due to the artistic contributions of Michael and Laura Allred. I enjoy the story too, but in a long-term kind of way. This is a series that probably reads a better in trade format than in single issues that cause a break in the action every 20 issues.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
Follow Dean on Twitter.
Grade
Conclusion