Night of the Living Dead by John Russo and Mike Wolfer

So I’m back with another horror comic review.  This time around it is for a prequel of sorts for one of my favorite movies ever, Night of the Living Dead.  The graphic novel that I’m reviewing here collects all 8 issues of the limited run series.  Basically what this book/series does is give some background into the familiar characters from the movie, as well as flesh out (pun intended) some of the more minor characters.  You get to see the events at the diner that Ben mentions in the movie, as well as getting to see some background on the Cooper family.  You also get to see where some of the zombies came from, including one memorable bug eating undead from the movie.

This is an interesting idea, but was pulled off with mixed results.  They do have some success with some of the stories.  There is a story about a woman working at the drive-in who ends up being the before mentioned bug eating zombie.  I thought that was fun.  I also liked the story with the gravediggers that explain what Johnny and Barbara run into during the opening moments of the movie.  One of the stories that they spend the most time on is what happens at the diner and the introduction of the Ben character.  I’ll admit it was kind of fun seeing the character in action again.

But as much as I enjoyed some of what I read overall this was a very frustrating experience.  Being only an 8-issue run there was limited space available to tell the stories.  So they really did try and squeeze a lot into each issue.  This makes for a very confusing narrative and honestly I found myself going back to try and figure out which character had already died.  I spent more time flipping back and forth then I did reading the comic.  This was especially true of the story arc with Ben at the diner.  There are so many characters that are hardly established that I wasn’t able to figure out who had died and who had lived.  Hell they don’t even give an establishing panel at the end of the story to show that anyone had lived.  Then later on when the survivors show up in another story there is a brief “flashback” to explain they had lived.

There is something else that bugged me about the series.  If this is going to be a prequel or fleshing out of Night of the Living Dead then please don’t waste pages on stories that have nothing to do with the movie.  We get a couple of stories with characters that never appeared in the movie at all.  I dig that the authors wanted to do their own thing, but in my opinion they didn’t spend enough time on the expanded Night stories already, why not use the space for that?  It also doesn’t help that the non-Night stories are also some of the weakest in the series. 

I have to talk about the art.  There are several artists that worked on the book.  But I’m not going to take the time to break each one out, I’m just going to talk about the art overall.  I love the look of the zombies and some of the attacks are very cool looking.  So that is a plus.  But I was a little disappointed that so many of the characters look the same.  This is especially so of the diner story.  This only added to my frustration when trying to sort out what the heck was going on.  Overall though I though it was okay.

This pains me to say but I can’t really recommend this one.  It is expensive ($24.99), not written that well, and has decent but not great art.  There are much better and less expensive zombie comics available out there (The Walking Dead comes to mind) for you to spend your cash on. 

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer