iZombie: uVampire

One of the first posts that I wrote for this blog was focused on the first volume of iZombie, and here we are today taking a look at the second. Now of course I was going to be enthusiastic about a new comic that Mike Allred had a hand in, even if it meant a long length of time without enough new Madman material. I remember thinking that iZombie was a great new series that brought some freshness to the often stale tropes of horror stories. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, mummies, ghosts....iZombie is crammed full of all of those old creatures. But Chris Roberson and Mike are all about bringing characters out of those different kinds of creatures. This second collection helped to flesh out the stories of the various inhabitants of the iZombie world.

Scott (or Spot) the Were-Terrier is the first character to enter the spotlight. His parents tragically died and he wound up being brought up single-handedly by his grandfather. Maybe that sounds a little boring, but grandpa is the guy who voiced Mr. Chimps, the cartoon character who for all intents and purposes appears to be iZombie's Mickey Mouse. You'd think that the guy who does the voice of such a cheery cartoon character would be a cheery guy himself, but that really isn't the case at all. Mr. Chimps was just a way to earn some scratch and the old buzzard is at least a little bit ashamed of himself for the life he's lived. He's also not so proud of his grandson's proclivity for reading comics and just being a geek in general. So Scott is an embarrassment  until the day when "Mr. Chimps" himself dies in a hospital bed.

Another valuable life lesson learned from the story of Spot the Were-Terrier: approach what appears to be a dead dog on the side of the road with caution. Maybe try not to even touch it...that's what Scott did, and he was never the same again!

If I may add one final piece to the focus on this issue, I'd like to report that Scott's grandfather is actually alive and kicking again. His soul is now animating a chimp from the local zoo and he's being hidden away in Scott's apartment. So now he really is Mr. Chimps, and he's not too pleased. One lifetime as a cartoon chimp was enough for him, and now it's all become a little more real...

Moving on, Horatio and Gwen go out for a date. They pick a minigolf place as their destination, and things are going pretty well until Gwen starts having attacks again. Eating brains has some really nasty side effects. Marion has been dead for awhile, but now that a part of her has been digested by Gwen she's been really annoying the poor zombie girl.

Gwen can't ignore it anymore and has to let Tricia (Marion's daughter) that mommy dearest regrets all of the awful things that she said to her girl when she started growing up and bringing boys to the house and rebelling. Gwen thinks that addressing all of this will make everyone feel a whole lot better, but she soons discovers a connection between Marion, Tricia, herself, and a family member of her own whom she had entirely forgotten about....things are getting weird.

It seems that Mike Allred needed a little break from the iZombie schedule (probably to work on that Madman stuff again!). Issue #12 features a guest artist, and it's not like when guest artists appear in a generic DC or Marvel comic, when all of a sudden the art gets really crappy for a month. Nope, not here in iZombie. The guest artist is Gilbert Hernandez, and speaking as someone who has never really read much Love and Rockets, the man is gooooood.

This issue puts the spotlight on Ellie the ghost. We get to see a little glimpse of what it's like to live in a graveyard with a community of ghosts...not surprisingly, they like to tell stories to make the time pass. Then Ellie tells her own story of how her father went away to the war and was never the same. He was always very withdrawn and only came to life when he was around his daughter. He didn't last long after Ellie got hit by a bus and died.

The neat thing that caps off this issue is when we learn that this whole story is taking place in the past. In the last few pages Ellie hears someone pounding on a coffin from underground. It's somebody who's "not dead yet," and that somebody winds up being Gwen Dylan. So it's nice to see how these two best pals met, and it winds up being a nice way to wrap up the collection.

iZombie: Dead to the World

iZombie has art by Michael Allred.  Read it.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////

…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!”