It’s been a good two weeks for zombie lovers. Last week gave them the DVD release of George Romero’s Diary of the Dead and Robert Kirkman’s director’s cut of Walking Dead #1 in preparation for milestone issue #50 of that great series. This week the rotting corpses continue to shuffle toward us with BOOM! Studios releasing Zombie Tales, three short takes on the zombie genre.

The three narratives are linked and meant to provide us with frightening windows into specific moments in a future zombie outbreak. “The War At Home” takes us to the hospital bedside of an Iraqi war vet at what appears to be the first moments of the zombie apocalypse. He ends up, along with two of his fellow wounded army buddies, fighting to protect a nurse in the hospital parking lot. This is the one story in the book that promises a “To be continued…” and I wish it hadn’t as it’s the weakest of the book. It’s an odd, totally action-oriented tale that seems to set itself up for some Romeroesque social satire and then doesn’t follow through. I also found the art for this one disappointing. Some of the zombies don’t look like zombie’s; a few are seemingly refugees from a vampire comic.

The second story, and by far the best in the book, is a creepy offering from Steve Niles that manages to combine the terrors of low-intensity marital conflict with flesh-eating rotting corpses. The art captures a crumbling Los Angelos and the zombie’s are suitably disgusting, especially the mutated wife of the main character. Portrayed as a hottie in life, artist Daniel Lafrance uses this fact to accentuate her current status as a shambling post-mortem horror.

The final tale is set far in the future, after zombie life has evolved into a fractured, mirror image of our own society. Humans are grown like cattle by zombie ranchers. “Beauty products” offer to slow down flesh rot while the local butcher sells human babies as veal. On one page, a zombie mom explains to her little boy that the human won't feel itself being boiled in a pot since its nervous system is so much less complicated than a zombie’s. Meanwhile, what’s left of the human race hides out in caves. Some good ideas and I liked the art but the down side to this final tale is that it cried for future installments and we are apparently getting none.

BOOM! Studios has brought out this series to follow up their popular Zombie Tale one shots. The Niles story is good, so pick this up if you’re a fan of his or if you gnaw your extremities off (or someone else’s?) in anticipation of the next zombie book. Otherwise, I’d leave this one on the rack.

---

What did you think of this book?
Have your say at the Line of Fire Forum!

---