Thursday , March 28 2024
A grisly new comic series posits a world where vamp and zombie attacks have long been a part of our history.

Reviews in Brief: FVZA #1 by David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez

Set in an alternate America where vampire and zombie attacks were so much a part of our history that Ulysses S. Grant set up a government agency to combat ‘em, FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (Radical Comics) is an agreeably splattery three-ish mini-series narrated by the distaff half of a brother/sister reared by their Ahab-y Uncle Pecos to re-kill the undead. Though the government believes that the vamp/zombie menace was successfully put down in the sixties, both Pecos and the reader know that'll rear its ugly collective head before the end of the first issue – and that Landra and Vidal, the two sibs trained in the ways of slay-age, will soon find their skills put to the test.

Based on a popular website, FVZA treats its potentially over-familiar material with a commendable seriousness. Scripter David Hine and painterly artist Roy Allan Martinez know the value of a good full-page blood bath — we get a particularly nice ‘un in the first with a mother and her brood of zombie kids — and they refuse to treat website creator Richard Dargan’s universe with any winks or obvious metaphorical layering. If Martinez’s art can be stiff during some of the expository moments, it’s energetically disturbing during the monster moments. The scenes where we’re shown the process of zombification are particularly clinically unnerving, while a sequence depicting the aftermath of two would-be vampires’ initiation into the world of the undead is also effectively doom-y.

So when’s the John Carpenter movie coming out?

About Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has co-authored a light-hearted fat acceptance romance entitled Measure By Measure.

Check Also

White Savior

Comic Review: ‘White Savior’ by Eric Nguyen and Scott Burman

'White Savior' by Eric Nguyen and Scott Burman shows that history, and even the present, is not always as clear as it might seem.