Mike Allred

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

Pop culture has been in zombie/vampire/werewolf overdrive the past few years, and it’s pretty rare to find a story that has a unique twist on the mythos. iZombie, an ongoing series from Vertigo by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, isn’t the savior of the genre, but it does at least have a few original twists on some tired old archetypes.

iZombie tells the story of Gwen Dylan, an undead gravedigger who has to eat brains once a month to keep from becoming a full-on shambling zombie horror. show more She doesn’t enjoy the taste at all, describing them as worse than “a cross between motor oil and someone else’s vomit”, but eating them keeps her sane and relatively normal, so she digs up the freshest grave once a month and does what she feels is necessary. One unfortunate side effect of brain-eating is that the memories of the deceased come along for the ride, and she finds herself compelled to finish their unfinished business. When the story opens, she eats the brains of a man who may have been murdered, and sets out to solve the mystery.

Gwen’s only friends are Ellie, a ghost-girl who died forty years ago and dresses like one of Austin Powers’ backup dancers, and Scott (aka ‘Spot’), who turns into a “were-terrier” during the full moon, which mostly just means he becomes embarrassingly hirsute. They live in a version of Eugene, Oregon overflowing with supernatural beings; the paintball place down the road is run by a coven of vampires that look like former sorority girls, and a mysteriously menacing man wrapped in bandages may be an ancient Egyptian mummy. Naturally, there are also monster hunters thrown into the mix, one of whom becomes a possible love interest for Gwen, which will surely lead to further complications down the line.

The art, done by the inimitable Michael Allred, is gorgeous, full of thick black lines and his signature Madman style. One particularly impressive spread in the middle of the book shows Gwen walking through the memories of another character. The memories are shown as individual panels in the comic, but are printed in an exaggerated halftone. Gwen seems to exist above the panels, standing between or on top of each individual memory. Allred’s art is easily my favorite part of this book.

The story is good, but mostly setup. The mystery established at the start doesn’t amount to very much, and many of the plot threads in this initial volume are not resolved. However, the explanation of the overal supernatural mythos is thoughtful, and most of the creatures are given an interesting twist. Only the vampires seem particularly cliche – too-beautiful women preying on lonely men. I think there’s potential here, however; Roberson establishes enough interesting threads that I look forward to reading future volumes. show less

As a Bowie fan and as a fan of graphic novels, this is a wonderful interpretive graphic novel biography of Bowie's life but it's not necessarily traditional nor straightforward. Bowie as a person was a complex enigma, who never let his personal life shine too long in the spotlight. He was also perhaps the quintessential post-modern rock star. I think that this graphic novel does a fine job illustrating how Bowie rose to fame in the 1970s and how he constructed a multitude of personas. And I show more found it compelling, informative, and fascinating in its own ways. 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