Review: Victorian Undead – Sherlock Holmes vs. Zombies / Writer: Ian Edgington / Artist: Davide Fabbri / Publisher: Titan Books

Sherlock Holmes is back in vogue on both TV and in films but he has never stopped sleuthing.  Zombies continue to much their way through endless limbs on paper and on the big screen.  In fact they seem to be a staple diet of horror films.  Then again, the current trends tend to combine a love for 19th century novels with macabre monsters. Jane Austen would be turning in her grave if not climbing out of it if she knew her work parodied and gothicised in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Ian Edgington (Stickleback) is the writer of this volume of the collected series that playfully pitches our deer-stalker detective into the centre of this cadaverous chaos and crafts a deviously entertaining case for him to solve.

Opening in 1854, a strange meteor is seen over the skies of London and doctors are confounded by corpses that don’t stay dead. By the summer 0f 1898, a plague of zombie is spilling out onto the streets attacking innocent citizens as well as Holmes himself. Along with Dr Watson and brother Mycroft, he’s determined to uncover the source of the undead army which the secret service has kept a lid on all those years as the flesheaters aim to take over the government and the dashed British Empire itself.  Confound the bloody-jawed bounders! Of course, with any nefarious scheme, could Moriarty been far behind.  Could even he cheat death? I don’t think you need too many clues to solve that answer.  So prepare for a bloody, limb-strewn battle on the streets of London.

Edgington, who has previously paid homage to HG Wells by writing Scarlet Traces as a comic-book sequel to War of the Worlds, relishes these cross-genre shenanigans with its added twist of an historical setting. It’s part adventure, part detective yarn, and part gothic drama. Sherlock makes a dashing hero as he slices and dices his zombie foes.  However, he also laces true events into the narrative too such as the cholera outbreak that swept through Soho in 1854 where the source did indeed prove to be a water pump. It didn’t bring the dead back to life though. It’s playful homage to both genres but told with an engaging energy that has an atmospheric edge for the era. The painterly art of Davide Fabbri, best known for his work on Star Wars and Aliens v. Predator series, is crisp and uncluttered, taking care with the geographic detail of Victorian London but adding these decaying feral corpses from a fevered imagination. Edinginton is next putting Holmes through his paces as he encounters Dracula.  For now, this is a frightfully fun read in bite-size chapters or devoured in one full sitting.

GREEN LANTERN: SECRET ORIGIN

Writer:  GEOFF JOHNS

Art:  IVAN REIS; OCLAIR ALBERT

Publisher:  Titan Books/ DC Comics (paperback, £10.99, colour)

This is the year of superheroes.  The God of Thunder maybe first to flex his muscles but our emerald protector is next.  Secret Origin, collecting 7 monthly issues, provides the groundwork for the big screen adventure.  retelling and expanding on how Hal Jordan became the Green Lantern when he first took over from the Golden Age persona, Alan Scott, over fifty years ago.  This particular tale is unveiled by the main man who has almost singlehandedly reshaped the legend into its new level of popularity, Geoff Johns.

The Lantern’s history is built up chapter by chapter starting with his estranged relationship with his family and his encounter with his predecessor, Abin Sur.  Then we meet Sinestro, the greatest of Lanterns, who introduces him to Killowog and the whole Green Lantern Corps.  Just as his hot-headed behaviour as a test pilot puts him at odds with his bosses, so too does his first dealing with the Guardians of the Universe as well as his new employer and former childhood friend, Carol Ferris.

However, we also see hints of the future with Hector Hammond’s transformation, the threat of the Manhunters and the prophecy of the blackest night, which Johns neatly folds into the origin to tie in with the current dramatic events that have been unfolding the past two years.

The clear crisp pictures from Ivan Reis, ably aided by Oclair Albert’s inking, give the story a smooth dynamism that drives the action forward in the brightest light.  As a comic book, it’s an engaging read in its own right but as a prelude to the up-and-coming movie (and so contains a few stills of the main characters as well as an introduction by GL himself, Ryan Reynolds), it’s green for go and read right now.

AMERICAN VAMPIRE (Vol.1)

Writer:  Scott Snyder, with Stephen King

Art:  Rafael Albuquerque

Publisher: Titan Books/ Vertigo (£18.99, hardback)

Vampires. They seem to be everywhere today, taking a bite out of movies, tv, books, comics, and drawing new blood in the process.  Comics have dealt with our fanged fiends in many different guises,  Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula being regarded as a particular highlight, and now spin-offs of Buffy, Angel and True Blood are racked on the shelves.

So could you stake a claim on the next evolution?  American Vampire, at least, has a refreshingly different setting, or rather duel setting since the narrative is split over two slowly converging time periods with outlaw Skinner Sweet being the ornery new vampire for the dawn of a new century.  And he’s the first of a new breed of bloodsucker: one that walks in the daytime.  The writing chores are divided over two people  Scott Snyder covers his exploits in Hollywood of 1920s whilst horror maestro Stephen King tackles his origins in the last days of the wild west. This volume collects the first five issues of the mini series and creates a engaging, darkly refreshing addition to the fanged mythos.

Los Angeles, 1925, and Pearl Jones is looking for her big movie break.  Her best friend, Hattie gives her a chance by inviting her to the glamorous party held by director B.D. Bloch   but her career path ends up being something with more bite. Bloch, however, is the old school creatures of the nights and sworn enemies of Sweet, a rivalry that first began in the previous century. Skinner Sweet was a murderous thieving mercenary back in 1880  who was set to be hanged until he was fanged, becoming a new breed of savage vampire who has no aversion to sunlight.  Both humans and the night-time breed fear him, especially when he has revenge on his mind.

American Vampire is a fusion of genres, times and indeed styles.  Whilst we have the obvious gothic arching between the two centuries, there’s also a taste of the wild west and the underbelly of early Hollywood. It’s as much a study of the country’s developing sense of identity, its lusts for fame, power and money set alongside blood lust. However, the unique twist in this tale is that it’s the work of two authors, taking two ends of the story with the intention of meeting somewhere in the middle. Scott Synder shapes Sweet’s adventures in 1920’s, with Pearl’s bloodied conversion adding further dark drama.  But the origin of our day-walker is left to Stephen King, handling his first comic script and he relishes the challenge of putting flesh onto a character we met 45 years later. The twins parts are effective individually but they gain resonance and depth when added together. Rafael Albuquerque’s artwork (seen on super-heroic strips, Blue Beetle and Robin) keeps continuity between them both and ensures the veins of darkly disturbing drama keeping running throughout the decades.  Fans of Northlanders should find it a suitable companion series in its inception id not its subject matter. More refreshingly, with a seeming over-saturation of vampires in the media at the moment, American Vampire manages to give the genre an energy-giving transfusion of new blood.

The Walking Dead Compendium One

Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Tony Moore

Image Comics

Out now

Zombies always come out in force, and no more so than The Walking Dead franchise which turned 1.46 million viewers into fans when its TV show aired on Channel 5 in the UK earlier this month (April). But for those who can’t wait until season two to air in the US come October, this 1088 page lap-bruising compendium has got you covered.

Rare is the mailbox big enough to accommodate this two-inch thick paperback if ordered for £26.99 online. And its thickness could even put off readers not used to seeing their graphic novels come in Yellow Pages format. But like one of the namesake flesh eaters, once you start you won’t stop.

Small-town police officer Rick Grimes wakes up in a world of hurt. An arrest turned bad sees him shot and put into a coma – and regaining consciousness in a world where the dead don’t seem to sleep, either. Danny Boyles’ 28 Days Later beat Kirkman to this gimmick by 11 months but similarities aside The Walking Dead shambles down a very different track. The 48 issues folded into this compendium charts a very long road for Grimes and his fellow survivors and, without giving anything away, a very bloody one.

But The Walking Dead’s strength is not the zombies, it’s the people. There are no shallow characters here. Connections are made, broken, and re-made, all too frequently and then suddenly  ripped apart and choked down as zombie fodder. Let’s just say Kirkman, like the Lost TV show, doesn’t subscribe to the Hollywood notion that plenty of face time doesn’t make you immune to death and what comes after it.

And in a comparison with the TV show, of which Kirkman is an executive producer, it’s rare to see the show explore and expand on mere moments seen in the comic than vice versa. Usually the moving picture devours its source material at a rate of knots and a storyline that took months to unravel is covered in a single episode. Not so here. Key panels become recurring imagery in the TV series, like a pair of lovers’ entwined hands with a missing wedding ring. Just because zombies are slow, doesn’t mean this comic book doesn’t have pace.

Everything plays out in its own good time. At first it can seem maddening to read characters running from a crisis to get help, explaining everything in full dialogue, and then returning to the broken action. But as you get further into the series this real-life sense of priority makes sense. Characters out of the scene need clueing in on what’s going on before reacting. There are things constantly happening and just because the reader has an omniscient view of the big picture, those inside it do need their sit-reps, even if it’s about who’s minding the kids.

Dialogue aside, it is Kirkman’s level of detail that really grounds this story in reality. One conversation sees the characters discussing the best way to stab a zombie in the head with a knife through a wire-link fence without losing their blade. After some trial and error, they adopt a technique for putting wooden hilt guards on the knives to prevent them slipping through the fence. Who else would have put this much attention to detail into their story? Arguably World War Z author Max Brooks, who said he liked the series. It is this level of detail that saw Kirkman tapped to write Marvel Zombies, where the level of a super-powered zombie’s chattiness is based on how full its belly is.

The monthly series of The Walking Dead now numbers in the eighties and all bar six of these have been drawn by Charlie Adlard. His shadow-heavy style initially seems at odds with Tony Moore’s clean-cut, square-jaw pencils after the initial Days Gone Bye chapter. But by the time you’ve devoured Miles Behind Us through to the eighth story arc Made To Suffer, you’ll agree there is no better artist for this work. Speaking at the Cardiff International Comic Expo, Adlard told a crowd that he was in Angola with his missus when a familiar voice burst out of loudspeakers in a town centre. It was him in a recorded interview about the popularity of The Walking Dead and, overcome by shyness, he “sloped off into a marquee really quickly”.

The Walking Dead can be rightly credited for breathing new life into the zombie genre and dragging the spotlight away from vampires. And even when said spotlight swings back in full force to the bloodsuckers, these corpses will still be staggering along with its growing fan base towards the series’ eventual conclusion, with still no end in sight.

And with the words compendium one printed in bold on both cover and side of this behemoth, it is safe to say there will be another 48-issue beast in the offing to further bow your bookshelves with.

Stiffs/The Pride

Writers: Drew Davies, PJ Montgomery, Joseph Glass.

Artist: Gavin Mitchell, Joshua Smith, Marc Ellerby.

Publisher: Self-published.

Out now.

The zombie zeitgeist continues to breathe life into itself when the undead go up against their most unlikely protagonists to date: the Welsh.

In the first half of this double comic, indie writers and Valley boys Davies, Montgomery and Glass have reimagined their Rhondda stomping ground as a place where monkeys talk up a blue streak and it is not unusual to see eviscerated flesh eaters roaming at night. Which can be a bit of a pain when all you want to do is drink at the Pick & Shovel. Who said nights in the Valleys were dead?

Enter crowbar-swinging Don Daniels and foul-mouthed simian Kenny. The camo-garbed call centre worker spends his nights slaying zombies, literally with a monkey on his back. While out on patrol the pair reluctantly check out an isolated house in the middle of nowhere to find flesh-eating squatters have scoffed up the inhabitants.

This 12-page instalment is the first of the five-part ‘The Apocalypse Party’ storyline and the character’s banter would not be out of place on such Welsh inspirations as Twin Town or Gavin & Stacey. Interrupting the zombie-killing drama is a scene in the pub where Don’s supporting cast of mates have gathered. The air is thick not with post-smoking ban cigarette smoke but with carefree insults like “knob” and regional dialogue like “ewe” instead of you.

Mitchell’s cartoony art smacks of early Michael Avon Oeming and he sets the pub scene quite devilishly with a customer taking a leak in the middle of the street. But his sunglasses-wearing Kenny steals the show with a combination of his relentless sniping and expressive face. The simian is also proving a hit on Twitter at the moment. Think Brian K Vaughan’s monkey Ampersand from Y: The Last Man, but with Tourette’s.

Originally titled Zombie Death Squad, Stiffs is off to an impressive start with clear story-telling, good art and a natural feeling world where you don’t overly question the presence of talking monkeys and walking corpses. But with zombies hogging the limelight at the moment with Zombies vs. Robots, Cockneys vs. Zombies and The Walking Dead TV show now on Channel 5, you have to ask: is there still mileage in the genre for the story to finish or will zombies be out and vampires in when the next Twilight film is released?

Not so much the JLA now but the JLGBT with The Pride, arguably the world’s first lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual super group.

Glass rounds off the book’s final eight pages with three short vignettes. Each is on a different member of the team and the first, ‘It Gets Better’, is the lengthier one and focuses on the gay Superman-esque icon that is FabMan – Tomorrow’s Fabulous Man, Today – who swoops in to save a suicidal teenage boy whose sexuality is about to be outed. The flamboyant hero does this not with a dramatic rescue but with sensible advice and telephone numbers for counselling.  We then get the secret origins of the Wolverine-esque White Trash and the crime-busting vigilante Wolf.

Glass and company’s effort to directly tackle what is considered a touchy subject by the mainstream publishers is commendable. To date we have had gay members of teams like Apollo and The Midnighter in The Authority but never a dedicated gay superhero team.

‘It Gets Better’ walks a tightrope above a vat of sugary melancholy but, without spoiling the ending, grounds itself quite squarely without coming across as morally preachy.

However, eight pages is not enough to introduce an ensemble cast of super heroes. The full team may be seen on the cover, but who they are and what they do is never revealed inside. Even FabMan’s name is missing from his own six-page tale. Only dedicated readers are going to check the comic’s Facebook page to find it out.

The art is big and bold, which suits its subject nicely, and has that Saturday morning cartoon feel to it, contrasting nicely with the night-time zombie thriller Stiffs.

Stiffs/The Pride costs £4, plus postage, from http://glassgears.blogspot.com

10thology

Creators: various

Publisher: Fat Boy Comics

Out now

There is no shortage of comic-creating talent in Wales, from veteran Doctor Who artist Mike Collins to 2000AD favourites Dylan Teague and Patrick Goddard. So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of an anthology.

And so 10thology was unleashed on the world at the first Cardiff International Comic Expo back in February. The title plays off the ten stories contained inside the handsome trade paperback format, each tale filling 10 pages. And with any anthology, you will get strong stories, weaker ones and, hopefully, great blasts of imagination that haunt you long after you close the cover on the book.

There are great tales in here, the first being The Sleeping Knights of Craig Y Ddinas by 10thology editor Stuart Tipples with Collins on art duties. A cautionary story in the vein of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the legendary knights safeguard gold and silver deep underground. But when a plunderer’s greed breaks the rules of the place, well, bad things happen.

Then there’s the origin of rugby by prehistoric man versus dinosaur in The Valley of Gwadni by Simon Wyatt. It taps into that Alan Moore-way of telling perfectly formed little creations by using a rhyming narrative to give it the feel of a song.

One story you will read at least twice is the non-linear Devolution. Chris Lynch has written a perspective-bending tale of time travel by giving different time periods to five wildly different artists, combining them into a plot told in panels that can be read left to right or up to down while still remaining coherent. No mean feat and, while the first read through can be confusing, the more you go back, the more you glean about the story beneath the story. It’s not quite perfect and can be jarring in places, but still qualifies as a technical triumph. Nazi bombs travelling through time to explode over modern-day Cardiff, Vikings stalking past the Wales Millennium Centre, monks worshipping a licence plate spelling DE1TY in the car park where once sat their monastery – Devolution has got it all.

Editor Lynch says in his foreword it was the anthology’s aim to usher in new talent, and there are able tales from these, too. Dai Hard by Rich McAuliffe and Jenny Clements is a cartoony tale of a security guard in the wrong place at the wrong time that must foil the assassination of The Voice aka Tom Jones. Steve Morris writes a Terry Pratchett-esque short story in The Clock where magic and modern day amble along together. Jon Rennie wisely lets David Young and Lucy Artiss’ pictures tell the story in The Edge of the World. And the team up of Jamie Lambert and Dave Clifford with their Second World War mob Dexter’s Half Dozen is good fun in The Hidden Flame, with the gang crash landing on a rugby pitch to return a dragon’s egg stolen from the Nazis back to a coal mine.

Some tales are perhaps too ambitious for a mere ten pages. Project Phoenix by Terry Cooper feels like the start of a 22-page comic book, but without the middle and the end. The abrupt ending of Red Cave, derived from the English translation of Llanfairpwll-etc, is unclear. But the text story Blood Brothers has gone a bit copy-and-paste mad, with the same lengthy passage appearing twice back-to-back, interrupting a crucial fight scene. Which is a terrible shame as the story about a yobbish caretaker versus the goddess Mallt Y Nos is good. Also plaguing the story was the bad decision to earmark the bottom of the pages with some blood-stained imagery to make the pages look less book-ish. But reading black text on a dark grey background, not good.

The absence of an apostrophe here and there in the occasional tale is forgivable, but the creators’ introductions are messy. Some use few words to detail their contribution to the anthology, others are more lengthy. An opportunity for uniformity has been missed here. Not wanting to act as the grammar police, but 10thology would have benefited greatly with a final proof reading as the typos and missed spaces add up, making the content sometimes at odds with the overall lush presentation of the book. Originally slated for release at the Bristol International Comic Expo in mid-May, perhaps bringing the book forward to capitalise on its launch in the Welsh capital has harmed it.

The editor has said it is his aim to make the anthology an annual event, which is great news. Any opportunity to see newcomers rub shoulders and learn from the masters is welcome and I’m sure future editions will be polished both inside and out.

Batman: Angels of Death

After its cancellation last month, Azreal’s writer, David Hine, has brought his characters to play in some other titles for a month. Originally touted as a three-parter, this arc ended up taking place over four issues. Starting and ending in Batman #708 and #709, the arc crossed over with Red Robin #22 and Gotham City Sirens #22.

The story involves Azreal and the Crusader challenging Gotham, on the behalf of God himself, to find one good person from its populous otherwise the city will go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. Batman, Red Robin and Catwoman happen to be at hand and so the burden is passed to them to prove themselves worthy of saving Gotham. Whilst the challenge provides a nice format for the story (introduction followed by three challenges) a flaw can be seen straight away. As Red Robin asks: “Why let them set the agenda?” Why don’t Dick Grayson, Tim Drake and Selina Kyle simply take out the two insane antagonists straight away? However, Dick tells them to play by the rules of the challenge and they defer to his authority as Batman.

Things pick up as the story leads into the Red Robin issue and regular writer Fabian Nicieza takes the opportunity to explore a side of Tim Drake that we rarely see; his spirituality. As Drake completes his challenge we are given insights into how he has come to form his beliefs, which are ultimately his downfall. Red Robin completes his task successfully, but is deemed to have failed when he admits that he is an atheist; he doesn’t believe in God, so the challenge passes to Catwoman.

As we move into Gotham City Sirens the story digs into Catwoman’s past and the sister that she abandoned as a street child. I have to wonder why Selina Kyle was involved in this as due to this revelation she had failed her test before she had started it. The cynic in me wants to say that it was to boost sales of Gotham City Sirens, but I hope that it was because the writer saw some merit in revealing major past indiscretions in this way. Either way the issue really feels like it has been forced into the crossover and doesn’t add much to the overall story.

The story concludes as we return to Batman and we find out what sin has been haunting Dick Grayson throughout this arc (which is apparently why he let the challenges take place). I won’t spoil it for anyone who still wants to read the story, but it involves a forgotten event from his pre-Robin circus days. Dick confronts Azreal and the Crusader, saving the day in what can only be described as an anti-climax. In the aftermath, we are left with the hanging strings of the mastermind behind it all (it’s not really a spoiler to tell you that it wasn’t God that was going to go Old Testament on Gotham).

The problem with this arc is that the main story is quite weak and could easily have been done in two issues. We don’t really get much background on Azreal or the Crusader, so whilst I know that Azreal’s suit of souls is slowly driving him insane, I didn’t really feel that I got enough background on the Crusader or his motivations beyond ‘he’s deluded’. Azreal seems to be led by the Crusader, despite the Crusader claiming to be sent by God to be Azreal’s disciple. Such is madness, I suppose. Obviously due to the nature of comic books, continuity is going to build up quickly, but I shouldn’t have to catch up on everything that has happened in Azreal to fully understand the characters’ motivations in this crossover. Speaking of which, the crossover itself felt forced at times and the story might have been better served by guest-starring the characters within one title. Gotham City Sirens in particular felt like it floundered, trying to understand why it was involved. Of the four issues, the one that stands out is Red Robin, as the creative team made the best of a bad lot by using the overarching story to explore their protagonist in greater detail, rather than adding further backstory through flashbacks.

The good news is that these issues will be collected together and won’t be forced into the collections of your favourite series. If you are interested in one character in particular, then pick up their issue, but unless you are an Azreal fan or a completist, I would avoid this arc (and the inevitable collection) completely.

Verdict: Disappointing.

Overall