Review: Zombo – You Smell of Crime and I’m the Deodorant / Author: Al Ewing / Artist: Henry Flint / Publisher : Rebellion / Release Date: Out Now

Zombo is a bit of a tough sell for your average comic book reader. After all, the market is saturated with zombie stories; happy zombies, angry zombies, super hero zombies, etc. The shelves are filled with tales of corpses that don’t have the good sense to lie down. What makes Zombo unique is that it’s utterly over the top, taking its cue from the ’80s, a time when zombie movies where funny (and thankfully rare) and British comic books were more about cramming as many amazing ideas as possible onto the page, regardless of anything as mundane as making sense.

Zombo: You Smell of Crime and I’m the Deodorant takes the utterly repulsive walking-corpse come super soldier and pits him directly against Obmoz, an equally dead villain who has been sent by dark forces (by which we mean the government) to destroy our hero. Oh, and there’s also a subplot about the ascension of the human condition, an evil planet, and the Shadow President, as well as an event that means Zombo spends a lot of book literally talking out of his arse, and I do mean literally. Henry Flint’s artwork suits this entire affair very well; the in-your-face gore and the attention to detail given to all the relevant squishy and strange bits are just what this work needs.

In Zombo: You Smell of Crime and I’m the Deodorant, the talented Al Ewing has written a love letter to movies like The Evil Dead and Basket Case and comic strip tales such as Death Wish and The Visible Man that most people won’t appreciate, but, if you grew up loving horror movies that were more about humour than chills, and you don’t really need a story to be linear in order to be entertained by it, then you’ll like Zombo: You Smell of Crime and I’m the Deodorant.