iZombie: Dead to the World

iZombie has art by Michael Allred.  Read it.

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…well, if you ask me, that should be more than a good enough reason to get into this book. But maybe not everyone is a complete dork for “Doc” Allred. Maybe some people don’t care about Madman at all, or maybe X-Force (and later, X-Statix) didn’t really strike them. The issue of Sandman with Prez in it, the Atomics, the Wednesday Comics Metamorpho series. 

Oops. Just had a big old tangent. This tends to happen when I start talking about Mike.

I was sad to find out that Allred was going to be shutting the door on Madman Atomic Comics, probably because it seemed like such a great experimental series that simply didn’t last long enough. The initial news that he would be working with Vertigo was great, then the title iZombie was a little bit of a groan (even Apple needs to stop with the iEverything), and then the news that Mike was going to be working with this writer whom I had never heard of…oh my.

Chris Roberson is this writer’s name. And after reading the first six issues of iZombie, I was really, really stupid to be afraid of liking this book. The Roberson/Allred team is doing some great work here!

Gwen Dylan is a gravedigger. Not a profession you might expect for a cute looking pinkish/purplish-skinned woman. She works with the guys but they don’t really know the truth about her. Just that little secret about how she is a zombie and has to eat a human brain once a month.

Eating a brain probably isn’t what you would expect. It’s not like normal food. When Gwen gets a taste of someone else’s grey matter, she also gets a flood of that person’s memory.

Without giving away hardly anything of the plot of iZombie, how can I make it sound like a lot of fun? How about the characters. There are a lot of them introduced in this book and every one of them is pretty interesting. Gwen’s best friend is a teenage ghost girl who’s been dead since the 60’s named Ellie. Then there’s Scott, the first Were-Terrier I’ve ever read about (ooo scary). There are sexy vampire women who are out to prey on the weakest of men. There’s Horatio and Diogenes, two guys with impossible names who also do impossible work for the Fossor Corporation, hunting all kinds of monsters just like their predecessors have for millennia. There’s John Amon, a maybe-mummy who tells Gwen the many secrets of the supernatural that she never would have found out on her own.

This is a book that is full of the kinds of quirks that come standard with any comic that Mike Allred’s name is attached to, but obviously a lot of the quirk is coming from the mind of Roberson too. One favorite thing is how Dixie, the waitress at Gwen, Scott, and Ellie’s hangout diner, never questions how her customers are pale to the point of transparency, or pinkish/purplish in skin tone, or happen to have hoodies wrapped tightly around their heads so that nobody can tell that they really have the facial structure and hair of a Scottish terrier.

One smart, smart thing that I bet a lot of writers would smack themselves over the head over (asking “why the hell couldn’t I have come up with that?”) is the classification that Roberson devised for all of the various kinds of spooky creatures that exist. As Amon describes, there is a whole system that can perfectly describe how someone can be either a ghost or a poltergeist, or a vampire or a zombie and so forth. There’s this concept of the oversoul and the undersoul, and what happens after death with each can lead to some interesting afterlives…

There's a lot going on with all of those vampires, zombies, and werewolves.

A couple of other good reasons to love iZombie: the other two members of the book’s creative team, the ones who might be a little bit out of the spotlight but nevertheless make this a comic that is oh-so-slick. The colorist is Mike’s wife Laura (as is true for any project Doc works on). Laura makes pages look beautiful. She’s definitely a huge bonus to the quality of anything that Mike draws. And the letterer, who is probably always the least-sung member on the bandwagon, is the legendary Todd Klein. It’s always just comforting to have a comic in your hands in which the which the words have been transferred from script to page by the guy who did things like Sandman and Promethea.

It’s just one nice looking comic from start to finish.

Maybe now that you’ve made it this far it’s safe for me to identify myself as an enthusiastic advocate of Vertigo comics. This is related to some of the comments I made in the post about the Eisners: Vertigo does comics that are different. Comics that stand out and do things that other comics don’t. While most of the readers of comics are adults, Vertigo is a company that makes things for adults to actually read. It’s a great imprint and I’m always looking to see what comes out of their offices next.

Anyway, iZombie. Nothing else will do to bring this post to a grinding halt, so it’s time for a Captain Picard quote: “Make it so!”