Wednesday 8 August 2012

iZombie: Dead to the World (2011)

For now, I'm just happy to be alive.
Well, you know what I mean.

This book collects issues 1 - 5 of the newish ongoing iZombie series from Vertigo. It was written by Chris Roberson who wrote the Fables spin-off series From Fabletown with Love and apparently writes some character called Superman - he'll never catch on. The art is by Michael Allred who is probably most well known for Madman.

The story concerns Gwen Dylan a zombie who works in a graveyard. Gwen is not the usual kind of zombie - she can avoid becoming a ravening, shambling monster by eating brains once a month. The price of eating someone's brains is that she experiences temporary imprints of the person's memories in her mind. After eating the brain of the recently deceased Fred Harris, Gwen discovers that he was murdered and feels compelled to investigate further with the help of friends Scott (a were-terrier) and Ellie (a ghost resident in the graveyard). When Gwen finally confronts the killer she finds that the circumstances of Fred's death might be more complicated than she was led to believe.

This offering from Vertigo has a supernatural setting - there is also a nest of vampire girls running Blood Sports paintball to lure in potential donors - where the traditional monsters that we all know are given a new twist by Roberson. I quite like the setup he creates for Gwen in this world. The book itself suffers slightly in that it is setting up the landscape in which the characters operate and Allred's art, while good, lends the book the air of girl's teen romance type book. However the premise is interesting enough that I will stick with it for at least another volume to see where Roberson takes the various monstrous characters.

First published on RevolutionSF on Wednesday Apr 06, 2011

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