I have, in recent years, become a big fan of Max Brooks. The young writer has really managed to step out from his father’s shadow and create a career for himself telling tales that don’t at all fit in with Mel‘s mileu. Max Brooks‘s tales are his, and his alone.
If you haven’t read either of his books, here’s an overview. A few years back, Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide, a rather tongue-in-cheek parody of survival books that gave tips and tidbits on how to survive a zombie attack. Although the book was often shelved in the humor section, I never actually thought it was funny. Entertaining, to be sure, and a lot of fun to read, but it wasn’t a comedy. It was a thought-provoking look at how the world would have to react in the case of a zombie plague causing widespread chaos. He came back later with World War Z, which was another book that was sort of mislabeled. Although it’s shelved as a novel, it’s really more of a collection of short stories, tales collected from people who had survived the zombie apocalypse and lived to tell about it. There was no pretense of humor here, it was a dark, chilling, excellent book.
Now, brooks has teamed up with artist Ibraim Roberson for a new graphic novel set in the same universe: Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks. In this book, Brooks lays out several historical encounters with the zombie plague — uprisings across the globe over the course of thousands of years. True to form, this isn’t really a traditional graphic novel either. Although it’s packaged and marketed as such, and even illustrated as such by Roberson, what we really have here is a series of illustrated history lessons.
In each section, beginning with the very first “recorded” zombie attack, Brooks provides a clinical, scholarly text describing the encounter between a zombie (or pack of zombies) and the humans that they want to munch on. We go from ancient Africa and Egypt to tales of the French Foreign Legion and the Cold War, with several stops in-between. The book provides some nice backstory, fleshing out the zombie universe that Brooks has created with his previous two books.
Fortunately, Brooks has paired off with a very talented artist. Roberson’s work is great — horrible stuff, scary and gory as need be, that looks wonderful in vibrant black and white. And Brooks, to his credit, knows when to shut up and allow the pictures to tell the story. Even some of the most seasoned comic book writers have yet to develop that instinct, but here we can go pages without any words at all, and the book is all the better for it.
Fans of Brooks’ previous two books really need to pick this one up too. It’s an essential chapter in the most fully-realized zombie universe outside of George Romero and Robert Kirkman.
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