Zombies and Broken Hearts

    (Matt Delight/Kevin Cross, 2005)
™ and © Matt Delight and Kevin Cross

Hey, what did the tough guy say to the zombie who hit his car?

You’re dead!

Well, zombie jokes haven’t exactly penetrated mainstream culture yet, and that one certainly won’t make it happen. But zombies themselves are on the verge of doing so, if comics are any indication, as witnessed by successes like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and a plethora of Steve Niles books.

While this comedy about a “young,” lonely, bar-hopping zombie could be construed as just the latest in this trend, resembling what Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters was to the ’80s indy comic explosion, it also shows just how pervasive the phenomena has become. This book was never intended to be scary; it’s played strictly for laughs and, as such, it works. But it also shows that zombies have become an everyday concept. (Imagine how creepy Frankenstein’s monster was in Mary Shelley’s novel; then imagine him working at the corner 7-eleven, and you get the general feeling of this comic.)

It’s an enjoyable story but one that doesn’t exactly advance the genre.

— Jim Johnson
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