Plants vs. Zombies: Zomnibus Volume 1
Sometime around about the year 2000 it became clear that videogames were taking over the movie business. You could say comic books were too, and in many ways it comes to the same thing. Lots of CGI and narratives structures built around the idea of progressing through various levels before facing off against a main bad guy at the end, then resetting or rebooting and doing the whole thing over again on an endless loop.
Plants vs. Zombies is a popular and very simple videogame that basically has the player using various weaponized plants to beat back an outbreak of zombies. Somehow they figured there was a comic book in there. And not just one book, but a whole series!
It’s all very bright and colourful, but as you could probably guess it’s spread pretty thin. A pair of eleven-year-old chums, Nate Timely and Patrice Blazing, team up with Patrice’s inventor-uncle Crazy Dave to stop the zombie army of Dr. Edgar Zomboss (he’s a doctor of thanatology) from taking over the town of Neighborville. Seeing as this is for kids there’s no real violence aside from the odd zombie limb falling off, and the day is always saved.
This “zomnibus” edition collects three story arcs, Lawnmageddon (an introduction to the basic storyline), Timepocalypse (using a time machine to collect various pieces of one of Dr. Zomboss’s evil inventions) and Bully for You (the best of the bunch, with a gang of college zombies getting revenge on Dr. Zomboss for having bullied them years earlier).
A comic for kids who would rather be playing a videogame doesn’t offer much for the rest of us. The standard zombie refrain of “brains” quickly gets tired, but not quite as quickly as Crazy Dave’s gibberish, which has to be translated throughout by Patrice. Meanwhile, the story just sort of jerks around with little in the way of connecting tissue between the various episodes, to the point where several times I had to check to see if any pages were missing. I guess it was worth sticking my head in the door, but it’s not a series I’ll be bothering with anymore.
Alex Good 
…Lots of CGI and narratives structures built around the idea of progressing through various levels before facing off against a main bad guy at the end, then resetting or rebooting and doing the whole thing over again on an endless loop…
That’s certianly how video games were around 2000, but it’s moved on quite a bit now. Isn’t it worthwhile to use video game characters to get gets off their computers and interested in other media?
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We still have the basic videogame templates. Contemporary games are more advanced visually but in many ways I think they share similar structures. Plus we still have basic games being popular. People still play Tetris!
Is it much of an advance to get kids off computers and interested in other media when the other media are taking their lead from videogames? And when it’s all just screen time in the end? I think kids have had their brains fried by social media now anyway.
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I had wondered about trying out this series when I was reading comics hard last year, but it sounds like I made the right choice in avoiding it.
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It’s very light, and I think is more for young readers on long car rides.
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A sop to the parents so they can fool themselves that they aren’t using videogames as babysitters
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Ha-ha. Yep. The tykes should be reading Turgenev.
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They should! in the original. Kids these days need to toughen up….
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““`is there an actual bus full of zombies?
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I don’t remember seeing that. Most of the zombies just shuffle along, though some are carried by balloon. Nevertheless, this is still a Zomnibus!
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