Zombos Says: Very Good
Zombie wars are hell, but there are worse ones. Teddy’s still fighting the Viet Cong in Hitchcock County, Nebraska, only it’s not 1968 anymore and zombies, and a twister, are gearing up to stress him out even more. He can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, living or dead, so the potential for messing up his chances at survival is high, and the pressure keeps mounting.
I remember the Vietnam War and how I was a stone’s throw away from being drafted and shipped out. I remember how close I was to peeing in my pants when I sat down in front of a big, noisy typewriter, answering questions asked by a disinterested administrative type who typed the answers onto my draft card. I remember holding the 4A draft card and thinking I’m so f*cked. Even my dad, who fought in World War II, said we’d move to Canada before he saw me fight Charlie and company. It wasn’t a good time for anyone. The guys I knew who came back from Nam never stopped fighting it in their nightmares or their memories.
Teddy fought that war, got a Section 8, and wound up still fighting the war years after. Not a good thing when you need all your wits to combat the walking dead. Mark Kidwell, Jeff Zornow, and Jay Fotos provide the essential spilled entrails and bloody gore, but it’s not only the zombies messing up the landscape, and that’s where ’68 Hardship moves to higher ground. It’s vivid, it’s sadly realistic, it’s never dull. If you like seeing zombies sliced and diced by a threshing machine, this is for you. If you like zombie stories with more bite beyond the usual us against them, this one’s for you, too. For Teddy, it’s all about us against them, only he can’t pinpoint exactly who “them” should be.
There was a television series in the 1960’s called Combat! starring Vic Morrow. Although it was about soldiers in World War II, Image Comics captures a lot of the show’s grim and gritty and realistic face of war in their ’68 series. The more realism in zombie stories, the better they are for it by bringing the zombies closer to home, even if they, like wars, don’t seem to change much.