Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I normally would be doubly skeptical of a story tying into both Secret Wars (ugh) and Marvel Zombies (double ugh), but then I saw it was by Simon Spurrier, who was one of the contributors to Titan's excellent The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two series, so I decided to give it a chance. I read the Ms. Marvel Secret Wars tie-ins back in the day; I only have the foggiest notion what it was about. I think a bunch of timelines got smushed together into the same planet? You don't really even need to know that to understand this, as long as you're willing to accept 1) Elsa Bloodstone is commanding an army against a horde of zombies, and 2) it's possible to run into multiple versions of the same character.

This isn't high art, but it is surprisingly enjoyable and well done for what it is. Spurrier and artist Kev Walker take the post-Nextwave version of Elsa Bloodstone, but treat the character more seriously than Ellis and Immonen did. What would it be like to grow up with all this trauma? How would it affect you as an adult, and how could you relate to others after it happened? Spurrier explores this with a mix of horror and humor, and I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's much better than it needed to be. Walker impressed me as an artist, too; good with both character and action. At one point, I thought, "wow this guy should draw Star Wars"... later I realized he was the artist for Marvel's Doctor Aphra series, and I was probably subconsciously remembering some of the art I'd seen for that.

The collection also contains one issue of the original Marvel Zombies series as a bonus, but no one's tricking me into reading that shit.

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