Broken Frontier

When a cosmetic company accidentally unleashes the zombie apocalypse, one girl and one artist can save both their world and this comic.

Zombie stories could effectively be their own genre at bookstores and the cinema; a few tales get the concept right, such as Dawn of the Dead (paralleling zombies to mindless consumerism) or Shaun of the Dead (being a romance/action flick that just happens to have zombies as a plot point, not the driving plot). It's an overused and overwrought concept, but superheroes were around for fifty years before works like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen did something new with them that justified their existence.

With comic books (and to a lesser extent, cinema), a newer genre has emerged of "teenage girl fights back". Apparently tired of the concept that all girls in slasher and monster movies have to be a bimbo that will run in high heels from the slayer du jour, this concept was largely revoked with the cultural cornerstone that was (and, oddly enough, still is) Buffy the Vampire Slayer. With it, fans of the genre got both a strong female lead that is willing and capable of taking down monsters and Joss Whedon, who, despite the balancing act of commercial successes and failures (for Buffy, there's Firefly; for Angel, there's Dollhouse; for The Avengers, there's Serenity) has had as much of an effect on dialogue in the industry as Brian Michael Bendis.

With these two facets, every company beyond the Big Two has tried to track it down in their own little way. For some, the magic is fleeting, such as Archie's Sabrina the Teenage Witch revival. Others seem to take hold and ride it for all it's worth, such as Hack/Slash.

Where does Alpha Girl fall in all this?

It can't decide.

On one hand, much like Hack/Slash, there's a good amount of backstory and drama for our heroine. Whether it should be covered in the first issue is debatable, as the plot divvies the issue into two segments; her origin and that of the zombie-like plague descending across the country. It's a little too much to cover roughly ten years of time in the first issue, and would have likely been better served throughout the storyline in tidbits. It would give the lead a bit more mystery, which given the meandering nature of the story, displays her purely as a bad-ass smoker with no real skill set. She's not shown saving anybody, fighting anything, or even interacting with anyone, save for the reader or a few lines of dialogue in flashback. The plot with the cosmetic company creating chaos gives two characters more personality than the presumed star of the book.

On the other hand, the dialogue and art is humorous; damnations of Hai Karate and stereotype-breaking (who knew there were punks that were stereotypically Jewish in dialogue?), and depictions of the lead as a child are Rugrats-levels of hydrocephalic, a stark contrast to the apocalypse going on for a few short pages in the book.

Alpha Girl #1 is far from amazing, and definitely not an example of putting your best foot forward. Unless things pick up in later issues, give the title a pass. It seems to be all-too-easily falling into a sea of generic tropes, and while a few may be upended, the book will likely join the other mindless masses… almost like a zombie.