Graphic Novel Review: Ross Campbell’s The Abandoned

The cover of Ross Campbell's zombie graphic novel The Abandoned (Tokyopop) provides a small double-take moment for the reader. It features the book's heroine, punkishly coiffed Rylie, holding what first looks to be a bloody bludgeon, blood spattered on her shoulder and around her pierced lower lip. It takes several seconds for the reader to register that the "weapon" Rylie's holding is a gore-dripping toilet plunger. When you're in the midst of an unexpected zombie attack, you use what tools are at hand.

A well-paced and grisly example of survival horror, The Abandoned is printed in digest form like the bulk of Tokyopop's comics series. I'm reluctant to use the OEL (Original English Language) label on this book, because unlike a more clearly manga-indebted series like Peach Fuzz, Campbell's art appears wholly western-influenced: we see none of the manga visual conventions that OEL artists are fond of inserting into their work (a sudden single-panel shift into ultra-cartoonishness, for instance). In look, Campbell's work is closer to a mainstream small-press series like Kirkman's Image zombie title, The Walking Dead than, say, Reiko the Zombie Shop.

Both Campbell's and Kirkman's titles set the start of their undead infestations in Georgia (Abandoned opens up on an island town outside Savannah, while Dead starts up outside Atlanta), interestingly, though I'm not sure that there's any thematic resonance in this fact – except to note that early island-set zombie stories frequently contained a racial or class-based subtext that the southern setting can't help recalling.

In The Abandoned, the living/undead divide is set along age lines: our beleaguered survivors are all post-teen or younger, while the first ravenous zombies we're shown are the tottering inhabitants of a nursing home. (This is the first work I can recall to give us the image of a zombie riding a battery-powered scooter.) Two members of our band of survivors, we learn, have birthdays within three days of each other – and, though we're only given the vaguest hint of the precipitating factors behind adult zombification, we still wait to see what'll happen when they each reach those magic days.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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