Empire of the Dead: Act One

The set-up for Empire of the Dead felt so much like that of George Romero’s movie Land of the Dead that I had to check the dates. Once again we’re in New York City (the “Empire” in the title is for “Empire State”) sometime after the zombie apocalypse. A social elite live in high-rises while a military force keeps the zombies at bay and an underclass survive on eating rats while being entertained by zombie fights held in Central Park. But the zombies, while always restless, are getting smarter. We follow one of them, a former SWAT team member named Xavier, as she returns to the city with actual thoughts in her head.

A lot of this sounds like Land of the Dead, but the movie had come out ten years earlier and this story adds one big wrinkle. Those elites who run the city are actually . . . vampires! It seems the bloodsuckers are a few rungs ahead of the flesh-eaters in the hierarchy of the undead, being smarter and all, but there are complications. As I understood it, a vampire can actually be turned into a zombie if they become infected, so if that happens they have to be “excommunicated.” To kill a zombie you still have to shoot them in the head, but to kill a vampire you have to split the heart in two, left side from right. It doesn’t have to be with a wooden stake.

At least that was what I thought was going on, mainly gleaned from some expository dialogue. But if you get killed by a vampire, do you come back to life as a vampire, or a zombie? Or a zombie-vampire? That seems to be a live question with one victim that the doctor character here is studying. I’ll also add that the doctor is the sister of Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, whose story is retold and extended a bit in a nice little bit of fan service.

You’ll have guessed from this that there’s a lot of world-building going on. And I did find the notion of zombies vs. vampires kind of interesting in an Underworld-style monster mash-up sort of way. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find out what happened as Act One is only the first of three volumes of this series (each containing five issues) and I haven’t been able to find the other two anywhere.

Graphicalex