Marvel Zombies Volume 1

Disappointing.

2005 was near the point of peak zombie, a genre fad that writer Robert (he’ll let you call him “the zombie guy”) Kirkman had ridden to huge success with his Walking Dead comics. I liked The Walking Dead, and indeed you could say I’m a big zombie fan, so I was definitely on board for seeing how zombification would go with the Marvel universe.

The answer? Meh.

The idea for Marvel Zombies took its start from a storyline in the Ultimate Fantastic Four, and as things kick off here the zombie apocalypse/virus has actually run its course. We’re in the ruins of a depopulated city with only superheroes left. Zombie superheroes, that is. I assume they’ve eaten everyone else.

These aren’t your usual zombies though, and not just because they still have their super powers. It’s not clear what the cause of the zombie outbreak was but the effect is somewhat similar to the classic Romero strain: those infected have a hunger for human flesh, and whoever they bite suffers the same fate (that is, if they aren’t fully consumed). What’s different is that though dead they have their minds entire. They know what’s happened to them, it’s just that they can’t control their appetite for flesh. After a good feast of flesh they’re able to function somewhat normally, but then the hunger begins to grow again . . .

They are, in other words, junkies.

I think more than anything else this is what gives Marvel Zombies its depressing air. To be sure, zombies have been used from the beginning as a kind of metaphor. They started life (after death) as slave labour in the cane fields of Haiti and went on to be identified with the lumpenproletariat, the underclass, or simply the masses. On a planet with too many mouths to feed and an economy without enough decent jobs for everyone, the zombie apocalypse was just what the name suggests: not a vision of the future but a revelation of our own class divisions and environmental crisis. Throw in the generic landscape of bombed-out, urban decay and everything about the premise here just feels grim. And then it gets grimmer.

I appreciated how Kirkman took things in a different direction here, and how dark it all was, but I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. It’s not that it’s too bleak or depressing, but more that the story, at least in the early going, doesn’t have much to do. What we get are fights between the zombies and the usual ascending order of level bad guys (who are now sort-of good guys). They kill Magneto and eat him. Then they kill the Silver Surfer and eat him. And finally they kill Galactus (!) and eat him. In this they are helped along by what I thought was a stupid plot device of having the heroes who eat the Silver Surfer absorbing some of his “cosmic powers” along with his flesh (or whatever it is the Surfer is made of). They need such an energy boost because their rotting bodies keep getting torn apart in their various battles. Captain America has the top of his skull sheared off. Spidey loses a leg. Iron Man loses his entire bottom half. Wolverine and Luke Cage both lose an arm. But they can keep going without losing a step because of the “cosmic powers” (or Power Cosmic) of the Surfer. I thought this was stupid. Given Kirkman had the whole Marvel line-up to play with I thought he should have had more of the heroes being destroyed completely.

The art by Sean Phillips is fine. The zombies are identified clearly by pupil-less eyes and the way lips and gums have disappeared from their mouths, which foregrounds shiny grills of teeth. For whatever reason the sun has gone missing so everything is equally dark, inside and out. Again: depressing. Arthur Suydam reimagines classic Marvel covers with zombie makeovers, even though these have nothing to do with the action inside.

The human story has it that Black Panther (who zombie Giant-Man had been keeping alive to munch on) has teamed up with Magneto’s Acolytes to maybe find some kind of cure. That part seemed kind of vague, but they manage to salvage the head of zombie Wasp so maybe they’ll be able to learn something from that. Meanwhile, the zombies who ate Galactus are hungry again and we’re left with them invading another planet. I can’t say this left me all that interested to see what was going to happen next, but maybe interested enough to carry on a bit more.

Graphicalex