Broken Frontier

When you want to get a whole lot of creators together to tell short stories that won’t wreak havoc on continuity, let them tell zombie stories. Fun ensues.

At first I thought Boom’s Zombie Tales was a confined universe, but this collection of stories leads me to now believe that it’s really just a place where people can tell zombie stories. And honestly, who doesn’t like zombies? They’re dead and they eat people. That’s cool. In this anthology we get to see a lot of different scenarios, but all of them have one thing in common…well, if you haven’t figured it out by now then methinks you’re in the wrong place.

The tales showcase the great variety of genres you can work with when you’ve got zombies. Humor, terror, romance, and espionage, all of them are here, and all do what they set out to. Not every tale is of the best quality, but none so noticeably bad that they can’t be simply passed over for the next one. Most creators in this anthology were unknown to me. In fact, it was disappointing that I felt the one story where I did know the creators, Keith Giffen and Ron Lim; was the worst of the bunch. Their story was of a wandering zombie as he encounters a number of encampments along the beach and tries to keep his memory long enough to make an impact anywhere. It was nice to see some Lim artwork again but in an anthology of stories that attempted to set themselves apart, this one just seemed to be there.

The best stories in the book concerned a deep conspiracy within the Catholic Church, an animal tale as the zombies try to take over the zoo, and an interesting way to kill zombies and appreciate dentists. The animal episode was especially fun for the simple juxtaposition of the zoo animals being more human than the zombies. In fact, all of the best stories in this book embrace the simplicity of their subject material. With zombies you can play around in a lot of genres, but you can’t stray far from the simple premise of zombies trying to eat things and then spreading their disease until the entire world is made of zombies. Make your story revolve around that or use it in a funny and interesting way and you’ve got yourself a good zombie tale. Forget that or try to make some poignant statement and you’re just trying too hard.

Zombies have become increasingly popular in comics recently. One must have to imagine that if you like zombies, you’ll be happy with this book. And if you don’t? Well, lucky for you zombie fandom isn’t spread through bites from other zombie fans.