Broken Frontier

Things heat up once King Zombie declares the death of the world within a few hours, but Dan stumbles upon a solution that may be a crimp in those plans.

The revival of Dead World continues to swelter into a huge blockbuster in the making, despite the constant comparisons to a book like The Walking Dead. Although I admire writer Robert Kirkman for his tenacious storytelling in that series, I can’t help but think Dead World paved the way for this current trend in zombie-run-amuck stories. It started out in the mid 80’s as the little indie comic that grew into a successful property, so it’s nice to see the series flourish again nearly two decades later.

The other great aspect that has me excited is how the immediacy of the story blooms into dreadful fruition in this fifth issue. King Zombie is determined more than ever to murder the world in the shortest amount of time possible, so he calls out to hordes upon hordes of the living dead to assist him in this foul plot. His mental commands are given out to thousands of corpses to head towards the river where the all the kids from the school bus have taken shelter on a river boat. While the kids gather their wits unaware of King Zombie’s diabolical machinations, Dan continues to flee for his life on land. He ultimately stumbles upon an abandoned outpost where he learns about a group called Safe Haven who may just indeed be the key to insure his survival, but his friends on the boat may not have that same chance.

So far this is turning out to be an intriguing story and writer Gary Reed seems to be finding his stride here. His plotting is intricate and the one thing I am enjoying is how all the story beats neatly fall into place. In previous issues I wasn’t sure where the story was headed, but it seems the main principals rear their ugly here and it’s great when all the key pieces finally fall into place. I wondered what the motive was for Dan to become separated from the group, bur after reading this issue it totally made sense. He was being used to segue to the Safe Haven group, and I thought it was a smart ploy on the part of Gary to bring this new element into play.

The other smart element coming into fruition here is the addition of Dalibor Talajic as the artist on this series. I know I wasn’t fond of Vincent Locke’s removal after just two issues, but Dalibor has done an excellent job filling in those big shoes. His style is uniquely his own and it differs greatly in terms of tone and texture when being compared to Vincent’s more loose approach to storytelling. He’s really coming into his own here and there are several panels seen in the opening few pages that really hit home for me. As this series moves forward Dalibor will no doubt have made his mark on this book, and I am sure it will lead him to bigger and better projects in the future.

Again, I can’t rave enough about this series. I am sure much of my appreciation for Dead World is purely for nostalgic reasons, since I was reading this series way back in the mid 80’s. I enjoyed the original run and hoarded over every issue like a greedy ogre, but now I am finding myself doing the same thing all over again with this new incarnation of the series. Pick this one up and I know you’ll be doing the same thing as I am.