28 Days Later #14 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragon (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: Our band finally makes it to London, but will it be what they expect?

What’s Good: Last month I was getting a little sour on 28 Days because I thought that the quest to reach London was getting so horrific that I just couldn’t imagine any group hanging in there.  Sane people would walk away and say, “No thanks!  Too hard!”

I should be a comics editor (LOL) because as if the creative team read my mind, they change things up in a big way in this issue. First, let’s get a SPOILER WARNING out here…

The big news in this issue is the death of a central character.  In some ways I feel a little silly saying “central” character because how attached can you really be to a character in an comics series that is only up to issue #14???  Well, it turns out that you see how attached you are when you see a final scene that is as well handled as this one.  The death is meaningful and is managed in a very touching manner.  I wish Second Coming had given Nightcrawler as good of a final scene as this.

In other developments, our survivors reach London.  The comic is going to get very obvious comparisons to The Walking Dead and those comparisons will not stop because of the events of this issue.  I mean that mostly in a good way.  Not only are stories like 28 Days about the horror of being chased by zombies (or the “infected”), they are about the complete breakdown of human society and seeing what sorts of barbaric systems the less altruistic survivors will make up.  So, much like the really awful things in TWD come via the other humans, we start to see that here in downtown London.  It is a very timely change of gears for this series and I’m interested to see how the creative team will progress this story without making 28 Days into a TWD-clone (assuming that they are very aware of TWD).

28 Days Later #13 – Review

By: Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Alejandro Aragorn (art), William Farmer (colors) & Ed Dukeshire (letters)

The Story: Having escaped the US military field compound, our gang continues their quest to reach London to do a journalistic story on the Rage virus.

What’s Good: This story just keeps trucking along, moving our gang from one tight spot to another.  It doesn’t let up for a second and is really compelling and tense to read.  In the last couple issues, we had seen our gang get apprehended by a US military science group that was set up to study the Rage virus and then escape, but not before the young boy traveling with them loses his life.

Now our gang is thrown right back into the frying pan after accidentally getting onto a train that is LOADED with the infected which leads to a classic comic book cliffhanger, “Yes, we can do that, but one of us will have to stay behind” – situation.  When you see a cliff-hanger like that in the X-Men, you just laugh it off and know that before any heroic sacrifices happen in next month’s issue, some other superpowered character will pop out of a time warp to save the day or it will turn out that the whole thing was a training exercise in the Danger Room.  That isn’t going to happen in 28 Days Later, so you know that something grim might happen next month.