Graphic Book Review: Zombie World Winter’s Dregs

Zombos Says: Very Good

Summertime fun getting you down? Can't wait for the colder days, darker days, more depressing sunless days? Want to bury all sand-loving, beach-going, family members and significant others up to their necks close to the water's edge at low tide? Fret no more. Don't get mad, suicidal, or homicidal; instead, pick up Zombie World: Winter's Dregs and Other Stories from Dark Horse, and bring back your sanity with its two-hundred and forty pages packed with apocalyptic carnage.

These four stories, originally appearing in the Zombie World comic book series, bring us closer to those undead we all crave. Think surviving the glump at the gasoline pump is hard, try dealing with ravenous hordes of commuters who want to fill up on you. With writers and artists like Bob Fingerman, Kelley Jones, Tommy Lee Edwards, Pat Mills, J. Deadstock (how apropos), Gordon Rennie and Gary Erskine, you can feel secure in knowing that your hard-earned greenbacks are being well spent.

The title story, Winter's Dregs, kicks off the mayhem in a fast-paced panel by panel exchange between central characters caught up in their daily lives–and deaths. In a city overrun by rats, when people dying in reverse shakes up the routine run to Starbucks, cry havoc and let loose the zombies. Each page is drawn in a heavy, EC horror comics, over-inked style, bleeding black into the surroundings, the characters, and the action. The murky colors create a sense of constant dread which lets up only after you reach the last panel. The story takes time to set up its characters first, then introduces zombies in a subway smackdown after the mayor orders a full-scale assault on brazen rats vexing his administration. Involved dialog and social interactions sustain the buildup to zero hour, fleshing out the people whose mundane paths intertwine with the staggering undead in this day in the life–and death–of a city.

Not looking forward to watching Christmas in Connecticut for the umpteenth time because someone else thinks it is so romantic? Dreading the family holiday get together with relatives you wish could fall out of your family tree? Home for the Holidays turns the yule-time into ghoul-time for one extended Connecticut family. Placing bloody-good zombies against a snowy-white backdrop tinged with a mysterious green mist, the stark contrast replaces the placid roasting chestnuts by the fire mood with the more terrifying intrusion of uninvited family members looking for a lot more than the usual hors d'oeuvres and fruit cake.

The Mathiesen family faces trouble up to their Christmas eye-balls when the local family cemetery turns into a non-resting place for Methuselah Mathiesen and the rest of the dead family tree. Told as a flashback by Greg, who is hiding in the attic, the horror begins when family members en route to the clan gathering are attacked. The usual family bickering is quickly replaced by gunfire and death. Suffusing every page is the color green as the mysterious mist envelopes everything.You won't be singing Jingle Bells after reading this one.

Eat Your Heart Out by Kelley Jones is a disturbing story of zombie love (or maybe just infatuation). Told in first person narrative, we meet one sick–I mean lovestruck–man who falls head over heels for the girl next door. Unfortunately she dies and becomes a rotting corpse. They say love conquers all and for this nutjob–I mean loverboy–nothing will cool his ardor, not her endless appetite for the living or her lack of personal hygiene.

Jones' illustration is morbid and his words macabre. His smooth, elegant lines contradict the harsh scenes, creating a somewhat whimsical, mostly horrifying, exaggeration on the theme of eternal love. His depictions of this high-maintenance romance, between feeding sessions and "dates," is a hellish vision of madness. Facial close-ups emphasize the intensity of this nightmare, and the denouement will leave you unsettled, but satisfied.

The last story, Tree of Death, is a partial fusion of H.P. Lovecraft and R. E. Howard's pantheons, with a touch of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen styling for its characters. At times over-served with tongue-numbing god-names and familiar supernatural elements, the imaginative illustration and ambitious pacing manages to hold the story together well enough, providing a frightening glimpse into a world overrun by demons and the undead. J. Deadstock's graphic depictions of devilish gods combine Tarot card, Hieronymus Bosch, and Sidney Sime-like line strokes and shadows, revealing these creatures in all their Satanic malevolence. One gets the sense that different panel arrangement and sizing would have aided the story-telling more, but the artwork remains exhilarating.

Using her tantric powers, Alice raises the dead and summons Azzul Gotha, the Necromancer of Hyperborea. Although she longs to be his bride, he has another girl in mind. As the apocalypse begins, a small group of would-be rescuers go after the Necromonicon Hyperborea hoping to use its counter-spells against the demon gods known as Qlipoth (derived from the Hebrew word "qelipoth" meaning shells, or husks). Drawing on the magic system known as the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life for its plot, Pat Mills confuses the action a bit with too many gods and too much exposition.

The introduction of the Killcrop, the chosen, Ash-like, slayer of the demons starts the zombie ass-kicking action, but following a splash-page showing apocalyptic chaos, an odd interlude on the subway, between him and Gotha's intended bride-to-be, undercuts the already established notion that the world is overrun with death and destruction. Trains do not run when zombies and evil gods are befouling the earth. Of course, not experiencing a zombie or demonic befoulment personally, I'm making an assumption here; but it seems a reasonable one. Although flawed in its ambition to encompass more than it needs to, Tree of Death is still an entertaining and imaginative excursion into the supernatural and zombie realms.

So if you must go to the beach, while others bask in the cancerous rays of the sun or swim in the polluted waters, you can be reading about zombies or eating gritty peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches. I know which one I'd rather be doing.