Review: Zombies Rule The Earth – Again – In ‘Almost Dead’ #1
by Tom Smithyman
It is inevitable that any zombie story for the foreseeable future will be compared to The Walking Dead. Ablaze Publishing’s new series Almost Dead practically begs for the comparison, though.
The story features a young woman who returns to her home in Maryland, though unbeknownst to her, it’s at the beginning of a zombie outbreak. After being knocked unconscious in the airport, Sara Walker awakens to find a world inhabited by zombies hunting down and eating the remaining humans. Anyone who has read the first issue of The Walking Dead or watched the first episode of the television series will immediately spot the similarities between Sara and Rick Grimes, who awakens from a coma to find a zombified world.
Fair enough. Good artists borrow while great ones steal. That doesn’t necessarily mean that writer Galaxy is brilliant, but there’s something promising in the script. Galaxy drops some hints that, unlike that other series, readers may learn more about the infection that is turning people into undead eating machines. And while readers can assume they know where Galaxy is taking them, the writer could easily surprise the audience.
One odd writing choice – likely because of Galaxy’s relative inexperience with the comics medium – is overexplaining what’s happening on the page. Comics are a visual medium, so there’s little reason to tell the reader you are flashing back to the past when they can clearly see it. And in the hands of veterans like penciler Ryan Benjamin and inker John Livesay, the story largely tells itself. Galaxy repeats that mistake a few times, which gives this premiere issue an odd feel at times.
Fortunately, the artwork is consistently strong. Sure, we’ve seen lots of zombies over the past two decades. But we haven’t seen Benjamin’s zombies. While we only get a tease of them in this first issue, they are sufficiently scary – and ravenous.
If Almost Dead can break away from the overly familiar zombie tale and give readers something fresh, it has a chance of standing out. Otherwise, it will be largely forgotten as another The Walking Dead imitator.
Almost Dead #1 is now available from Ablaze Publishing.
Overview
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The main character wakes up after being knocked out for several days and finds the world overrun by zombies. This is clearly a familiar tale, but it shows some promise of stepping out of the shadow of that ‘other’ zombie franchise. And it has some great illustrations that set it apart.
