Tag

This Deluxe Edition of Tag is actually two comics that don’t have much to do with each other aside from both being written by Keith Giffen. The first is the three-part Tag story, which has a young man named Mitch being “tagged” with a curse that kills him but turns him into a zombie, rotting on his feet until he tags another victim. The only wrinkle is that the next person to be tagged has been pre-selected by fate or karma because of something they did to the tagged person, perhaps many years before.

It’s all a bit awkward, and Mitch actually has to go online and find someone’s blog explaining how it works. There are also clues to the identity to the next person in the zombie chain coming by way of visions that are sparked when tagged. I had the sense it would make an interesting Blumhouse horror flick, as it plays a bit like It Follows, Truth or Dare, or similar viral horrors. And to give it credit, it’s also a bit unorthodox in that Mitch, despite his predicament, isn’t a very sympathetic character most of the time and things end on a down note. I also thought the art kind of grim, with a lot of shadow and a really limited palette.

That’s it for the first comic. What follows is the Dead Meat trilogy (Dead, Deader, Deadest), which follows the post-apocalyptic adventures of a zombie mercenary. I don’t think the story has anything at all to do with Tag, and the comics are so slight as not to amount to much anyway. In the final part I thought there was some potential with the merc’s frying brain pan resulting in a kind of creeping dementia, and again things end on a bit of an odd note, but I can’t say it was anything special.

So two comics in one here, but while both had potential that they showed signs of developing I didn’t think either was very good. I wouldn’t say either was bad though, and they add a bit to the now very mature tradition of zombie literature, especially in the use of the first-person (or first-zombie) perspective and the analogy drawn between zombification and aging.

Graphicalex