1962. An atomic bomb test is taking place in Nevada. The general in charge has commanded that the site of the explosion should be shifted, so that all the troops assembled to observe it are now within the fallout zone. One of them, a private called Fellows, voices a mild protest – “If they moved the test they should’ve moved us too, right?” – but is given short shrift – “If I wanted your opinion, I’d wipe my ass and say please”.
When the bomb goes off, the fallout takes the form of red snow. Fellows is the only one who keeps his gas mask on. Almost immediately, the other soldiers, having inhaled the snow, start to mutate into zombies. Fellows runs for his life, steals a jeep, and smashes through the perimeter gate to escape the camp.
He upends the jeep, and takes refuge in a diner called Old Joe’s which he reaches by foot. The zombies soon show up on the horizon. Subsequently, he and a couple of others from the diner make a further escape in a truck which runs out of gas; walk to an abandoned town called Dead Water, which has only one remaining resident (a man called Gage); and when the zombies turn up there too, escape again through an old silver mine; ultimately arriving at an empty shack next to a radio mast in the middle of nowhere.
In terms of its plot, News from the Fallout is a standard zombie apocalypse tale. What makes it stand out is its visual design. It’s in black and white, but a particularly gritty, grainy version of black and white, which resembles both old newsprint and old film. The sound effects lettering is angular white, sometimes blurry, sometimes scratchy, always irregular and kinetic.
Almost all the characters are only shown as silhouettes, which means that each of them has to be given a distinctive shape in order to make it clear who is who as the action unfolds. Old Joe, the owner of the diner, has a pipe and glasses; his assistant Nancy has a distinctive hairdo; Gage Hepburn, the only man living in Dead Water, has a wide-brimmed hat; and so forth.
All of the shapes are simplified, and in some cases exaggerated. The zombies have clawlike hands and skull-like heads. When Fellows runs, his arms and legs stretch out to indicate his speed and urgency. Buildings, slatted blinds, vehicles, bridges and radio masts are geometric and sharp-edged. The story takes place in the Nevada desert, and the graphic style gives a powerful sense of bleak and minimalist landscapes.
There is one sequence, set in the silver mines, where for several pages we are given only panels filled with blackness with some white text on them. It feels like the logical culmination of the minimalist style.
News from the Fallout does have its weaknesses. There are a number of flashback sequences, labelled “Before the Bomb”, and also a number of context-providing text documents – army reports, letters, newspaper cuttings. None of these really add much to the main story.
Like the main character in George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (to which the writer, Chris Condon, acknowledges his debt), the central character in News from the Fallout, Private Fellows, is Black. The oppressive behaviour directed towards him because of his colour reinforces his status as an outsider, a survivor, and a Cassandra figure whose warnings are routinely ignored or derided by his listeners.
It’s also worth noting that Fellows’ status as a good guy is flagged up by his sympathetic attitude towards animals. We see him bonding with a cat, and when he flees from the army camp the reason he crashes his jeep is because he’s trying to avoid a rabbit in the road. A couple of other characters in the story are flagged in the same way – Joe, the restaurant owner, shares a bit of food with a scavenging mouse; and Gage, the only man left in Dead Water, is abrupt towards other humans, but devoted to his dog Spirit.
In an afterword to News from the Fallout, the artist, Jeffrey Alan Love, recounts that he was just about to start work on the comic when his area of Carolina was hit by Hurricane Helena. “This is something I’ve experienced over and over again in my life – that it only takes a moment for everything to change because we are all living on the knife’s edge.” And this sense of fragility is something that comes across very strongly from the story. As Nancy says in the darkness of the silver mine, “This mornin’ we opened up the restaurant like normal… What the hell happened?”
Just as Night of the Living Dead embodied the cold war paranoia, distrust of authority and dread of nuclear war which were commonplace in the 1960s, so News from the Fallout, although it’s set in the Sixties, reflects the hollow complacency, rage-fuelled extremism and environmental terrors of our own times. It’s a retro piece, but it feels very current.
Chris Condon (W), Jeffrey Alan Love (A), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (L), Michael Tivey (D) • Image Comics, $19.99
Buy online from Gosh Comics here
Review by Edward Picot
