Comic Pic– Er, What I’ve Been Reading 8/4/09

Due to unavoidable family problems, no podcast for this week. While I’ve been able to get around to John’s on a pretty regular basis to record these, this weekend threw us a curveball. That said, I’m betting that John wishes things didn’t turn out like this more than I did. So instead of a podcast I’m giving you lots of text this week. Text about zombies!

What kind of zombies? Marvel Zombies!

“Marvel Zombies 3” came out in hardcover today. While I’ve talked about the first volume on the podcast before, the short version is that it’s an inventively disgusting series that effectively trades on the feeling of “I can’t believe they just did that with Marvel characters!” Cleverly written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated with style by Sean Phillips, it was the biggest surprise hit the comics industry had seen in years. While most series go through a slow or sudden decline from month to month, “Marvel Zombies” kept racking up reorders for months after the series ended.

This being a Marvel comic, a sequel was produced around a year or so later. This is in spite of the fact that the first mini-series ended in a way that didn’t really lend itself to sequelization. spoiler I mean, how do you top having Zombie Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Iron Man and Luke Cage eat Galactus, gain his powers and then go off into the universe to eat the rest of the cosmos? end spoiler Kirkman’s answer to that problem was to have the zombies come back to Earth and find a way to use Reed Richards’ technology to open up a portal to another universe to eat. (It bears mentioning now that the original “Marvel Zombies” mini-series was spun off from an arc of “Ultimate Fantastic Four.” While it wasn’t a bad series, it was easily the least consistent Ultimate title in terms of quality, and will most likely be best remembered for spawning “Marvel Zombies” more than anything else.)

This brings them into conflict with Zombie Black Panther and Wasp, who have learned to control their hunger but face increasing resistance from some of the more power-hungry humans in their settlement. Long story short: The zombies fight and are eventually banished to some other dimension, never to bother this one again (in theory). I was impressed that Kirkman was able to wrangle as much story as he did from where he left off with the original mini-series, but even though Phillips was clearly having a blast drawing everything here the shock-value thrills of the first series weren’t as effective here and “Marvel Zombies 2” couldn’t escape the law of diminishing returns. While its ending more directly teased the third series, I can’t say that I (and the comics-reading population) were thrilled about its prospects. Toss in the fact that Kirkman and Phillips were replaced with writer Fred Van Lente and artist Kev Walker, and you have a recipe for disaster.

So imagine my surprise when I started reading the reviews for this series and found the general sentiment of them to say something along the lines of “This is a series that is better than it has any right to be.” After having read “Marvel Zombies 3,” I can see what they’re talking about. The big draw for this series was that it was going to have the zombies invading the regular Marvel Universe, starting in Florida with Zombie Deadpool leading the charge. The attack is contained, but the incident draws the attention of the Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response agency (a.k.a. A.R.M.O.R. and the only thing more ridiculous than its acronym is that it actually makes sense when you consider the purview of similarly named organizations S.W.O.R.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Marvel U) and while they’ve been working on a vaccine for the zombie virus, they need untainted human blood from the Zombie U in order to make it work.

Now if you can get past that setup, then you’re going to enjoy the rest of the book. If you can’t, then I doubt anything I say after this will change your mind. That is, unless you’re a fan of Aaron “Machine Man” Stack. I’m not talking about the character as he was portrayed for years after being created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, I’m talking about his Warren Ellis “My robot brain needs beer!” revamp from the pages of “Nextwave.” If the idea of a machine fueled by beer and notions of robot pride and “Death to the fleshy ones!” set against a legion of ravenous flesh-eating zombies along with his robot ex-girlfriend Jocasta sounds like a good time to you, then this is the comic for you!

It takes Van Lente and Walker a little while to get up to speed, as most of the first issue is spent setting everything up. While this is all necessary for the carnage and hilarity that ensues later, it’s a little on the dry side, and Walker doesn’t really get a whole lot of interesting stuff to draw. I was fearful for a bit when Aaron was being taken to task by Jocasta for forsaking the hero spirit he used to have in favor of a “look out for number one” worldview held by most fleshy ones. Usually when this is done in most comics, it’s a sign that the character is about to revert to the way he was characterized in the past, negating whatever changes have been made to his characterization over the years.

Once the zombie slaughtering begins, however, things pick up immensely. While I’ve never ready anything by Van Lente before, I’ve heard lots of good things about the series he has written and he acquits himself very well here. He captures the spirit of Ellis’ take on Aaron Stack very well and knows how to craft imaginatively gory fight scenes. Seeing Stack slaughter his way through a zombie feast, while performing a brutally fake out on Zombie Stilt-Man along the way, and then escape on Zombie Ghost Rider’s motorcycle is a blast.

While Kev Walker is no Sean Phillips, he still manages to draw the hell out of everything that Van Lente cooks up. Things get even better once the zombie outbreak reaches the A.R.M.O.R. base as we get to see a living Zombie Vampire, Stack re-phrasing “I’m here to kick bubblegum and kick ass…” then playing fetch with Zombie Lockjaw and an exploding brain and Zombie Captain Mexica, hero of Earth 1519. Yes, this is the comic book equivalent of junk food, but it satisfies on the same level.

While it would’ve been nice to say that this ends the “Marvel Zombies” series on a high note, that’s not the case. The final pages of the series set up “Marvel Zombies 4” (the first issue of which came out today as well) with Morbius the Living Vampire set to lead the reassembled “Midnight Sons” on a trip through alternate dimensions to find the one zombie that got away. Though Van Lente and Walker impressed me with this series, I can’t say I’m that interested in reading about what happens to Morbius and co. in the next one as I don’t hold the same feelings for him as I do Ellis’ take on Machine Man, and the blatant “WE ARE EXTENDING THE FRANCHISE” scene that takes the place of an ending is a real turn-off for me. Even if the story doesn’t have a true ending here, I think this is a good place to draw a line under the series. Unless the first issue of the new series has Stack going “You must be joking, right?” and then proceeding to beat the crap out of Morbius and the Midnight Sons and take off with Jocasta through the multiverse. That’d be worth paying $20 for right there.