Chris Roberson

This is just great. With Northlanders, Scalped and DMZ all winding to a close, you always start to worry about Vertigo as an imprint without a few successful new titles on the go. Unwritten is doing well, and I really, really want iZombie to do well, too. Set mostly in and around a graveyard in Eugene, Oregon, our heroine is Gwen, a gravedigger and zombie, who is forced to dig up the freshly dead to eat their brains or risk losing her memory and turning into a shambling mindless monster. Her show more best friend is a ghost, her other friend is a were-terrier. Elsewhere, a coven of vampires is running a paint-ball game and a pair of monster-hunters are in town, hunting for monsters. Gwen's latest meal comes with an unpleasant set of memories: namely the murder of the deceased. To calm the dead she promises to track down the killer, but quickly discovers that nothing is as it seems.

Okay, remember Buffy? Remember how cool Buffy was, with her adorable friends and her heavy burden and complicated plots and clever stories? Well, iZombie is nothing like Buffy other than the obvious supernatural stuff. But it's got a vibe to it that fans of Buffy will recognise and appreciate. Strong female characters. Witty script. Dodgy romance. A weird world that promises to get weirder. Mike Allred's beautiful, distinctive pop-art. laura Allred's colours - seriously, lovely colours on a Vertigo book. It's like a goddamn miracle.

It's also, last but not least, a surprisingly fresh take on zombies. Who knew there was still meat on those bones? No? Um. Bringing a dead genre back to shambling life! Better? No? Okay, try: this zombie has beauty as well as braaaains! Oh, feck off. Write your own stupid damn pun. You think this is easy? Huh? Well it ain't. Can't get any apreciation around here, I swear. show less

Masks is about the difference between "law" and "justice." It's about doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and the struggle to do the right thing no matter what. And it's about the very fine line heroes walk and how badly things can go if they confuse the two.

This is my favorite sort of superhero (mask) storyline. I love watching what happens when heroes take the law into their own hands. Do they remain heroes or do they become villains? I especially like the contrast between the show more various masked heroes in the way they approach law and justice: this book gives us nearly the full spectrum from the very good to the very bad, and shows us that often it's all a matter of opinion.

My favorite character was The Shadow. He, for me, stands on the line between good and evil, clinging to his ideals of justice and going much further to enforce them than others would.

(Provided by publisher) show less

I reviewed the volume collecting the first few issues of this series a few years ago, and I remember leaning heavily on the Buffy comparisons. Then they went and made it into an ensemble TV show, which I like quite a lot, but now that I've read the whole thing, I rather regret the Buffy comparison. It's nothing like Buffy at all. It doesn't even engage that much with its own premise of zombie-girl-detective, it's way more about Gwen trying to come to terms with her condition and make friends show more and live her new life surrounded by ghosts and monsters and monster-hunters. The book is packed with classic horror tropes and characters out of cartoon television and old-time comics, and Mike Allred's glorious pop-horror art immerses you in this crazy, colourful world of mummies and were-terriers and vampire paint-ballers. I loved it, though I think it's a pity some of the ideas weren't given a chance to expand a little. In the end though, it feels gloriously packed and thronging with ideas and stories and plots. Never mind either Buffy or its own TV adaptation, this is very much its own thing. show less

This was so close to a "did not finish" that that possibility became more of a nailbiter than the actual story I read.

The most common word I uttered through these eight painful issues was "why?" Why use the Doc Savage name when you're literally going to ignore virtually every single thing about Doc Savage and what made his adventures so much fun?

Roberson spins us through 80-odd years in the eight issues. In the first one, we meet his original crew, but the artist (honestly, the art is so show more boring, I can't be bothered to look up the name) ignored all physical descriptions (and there's lots in the books) for Monk, Ham, Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny...and especially Doc himself. Doc looks exceedingly ordinary.

After the first issue, we're zooming ahead in time, so three of the five are summarily dispatched offstage, leaving only two behind as boring old farts. And then this is the standard going forward, meeting a character, seeing them age, then they're dropped with no explanation.

Minor lip service is paid to a couple of original DS adventures, but they're immediately twisted, renamed and then we move on.

Seriously. This entire thing is just terrible. A cheesy, drawn-out way to bring Doc up to present day, but done so clumsily, and so damn boringly, that it's hard to give a damn when it feels like the creative team didn't really give a damn about honouring the original that much.

What a waste of time and trees. show less