Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell

Damn, now that’s a zombie comic cover! Nothing like an eyeball floating in the bowl of a hollowed out skull with a smoking shotgun barrel in the background. Could the comic itself live up to this?

No, it doesn’t. And in fact the cover is by Santíperez while the comic itself is illustrated by Drew Moss. So different artists. There’s a gallery of covers by Santíperez included in the bonus material here though and they all look nearly as cool.

In my review of the movie Zombieland I suggested that 2007 might be taken as the year of “peak zombie.” It just seemed like zombies were everywhere and nothing new was being done with the genre. So this comic, billed as a prequel to Road of the Dead though I’ve never heard of that book, was coming very late to the party (it was published in 2019). In particular, this really feels like a colour version of Kirkman’s The Walking Dead mixed with even older elements borrowed from the Romero films. There are highways jammed with stalled vehicles. There are warrior biker gangs. There’s a pair of pet zombies kept on chain leashes. There’s a guy with a spiked baseball bat. There’s a battle tank that turns out to be surprisingly (and unrealistically) effective in taking out zombies. There’s a story involving the attempt to transport a scientist working on a cure for the zombie virus to a safe haven in . . . you guessed it: Canada!

I don’t think there’s any way writer Jonathan Maberry wasn’t aware of all this. He even kicks things off with a billboard advertising the Monroeville Mall (setting of Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead). But it’s hard to draw much of anything from a well that’s already been pumped dry. You can go the route of zombie parody, but even that was getting stale by this time. So there isn’t much to do here but watch the splatter. There’s a slightly more contemporary wrinkle added by the fact that the gang chasing our heroes are members of a sort of conspiracy cult, believing that a cure is being kept from them by government elites. But that’s never developed. And of course the underlying philosophy of the zombie genre is still in play: that the zombie apocalypse only reveals the state of nature as it already exists, a war of all against all with civilization a transparently thin membrane stretched over the abyss. Our lives so routine, meaningless, and devoid of human attachment we might already be dead. As the narration explains:

This is how it is now. Everywhere is a trap. Everyone is an enemy. Each of us is a traitor to the living the second we die.

Ten thousand years of human civilization. Everything we learned, everything we built, all we know about the world and the universe. And now the only thing that defines us is whether we’re predators or prey.

No dignity left. Hope and optimism are getting bitch-slapped. Compassion’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for this sort of end-of-days nihilism, but as I say it’s something that’s foundational to the zombie genre and the fact is that Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell doesn’t have a new story to package it in. It’s the sort of comic I’d usually recommend only if you’re a huge fan of zombie stuff, but actually if you’re a huge zombie fan then you might feel let down by how unoriginal it all feels, since I’m sure you’ll have seen it all before. So while it’s an OK comic, it’s kind of hard to recommend to anyone except splatter-action devotees.

Graphicalex