IZombie #13 – Review

By: Chris Roberson (writer), Michael Allred (art), Laura Allred (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: After spending the first dozen issues mostly sorting out who these freaky characters are, it seems that we are embarking on our first mission-based story arc having to do with the evil Galatea and an outbreak of zombies.

What’s Good: This is another very strong month for this title visually.  After taking a break last month, Michael Allred is back on art duties; and when you combine his clean, efficient and organic style with Laura Allred’s soft and tasteful colors with Todd Klein’s artful lettering, you get a pretty product again.  If you read comics largely for the graphical storytelling (as I do), just the combinator of these 3 masters at work accomplishes 80% of the battle of having a good comic.  What I love so much about Michael Allred’s work is seeing how varied and organic his lines look.  Just look at any panel in the comic and see how many varied thicknesses of line he shows.  You can almost start to guess what kinds of implements he is using.  One thing that makes the final product really distinctive are the partially shaded aspects you get with what looks like a gray marker.  It isn’t clear if Michael is going that (with a marker) of if Laura adds the effect while coloring, but it allows for subtle shading while maintaining an almost flat coloring style for most objects.  Flat colors just kick all kinds of ass and if you don’t believe that, take two comics, one that has flat colors and one with this highly rendered stuff and put them across the room and see which one POPS out at you.

The story itself settles a lot in this issue.  IZombie has been very enjoyable, but its biggest fault is that there is just too much good stuff going on.  You had the main characters, the vampire ladies, the chimpanzee grandfather, Amon the dude with all the secrets, Galatea and her vampire underling and the monster hunters.  Often times, it was just too much to keep track of, but in this issue, it seems to be streamlining into two stories (that’ll probably connect).  The stories seem to promise some answers to what Galatea is up to and also threaten the gang with some Romero-style zombies.  The zombies might even have some impact for our main character, Gwyn – The Friendly and Attractive Zombie who is trying not to become a shambling, “BRRAAAIINNSSSSS!” zombie.

What’s Not So Good: Even with what I’ve said above, there is still a little too much going on in this issue.  The part that bugged me is that the vampire girls show up for a couple of pages and while I really like the vampire girls, it isn’t clear what they have to do with the story right now.  It kinda seems like they could go back on the shelf for a few issues until we have more resolution on what appear to be the main story lines.  Then, we get a back-up story, that has all kinds of cool/awesome wackiness like a Soviet zombie/special-forces soldier, a talking brain in a Mr. Coffee pot and a team of super agents consisting of an lucid zombie, a funky ghost and a were/she-male.  And, that part is awesome! But as I’ve said, this series has already got a lot of things going on at once and now we’ve got ALL this new stuff too.  It’s almost too much awesome at once.

Conclusion: Great, great issue (and series) from a visual standpoint.  The story is enjoyable too, but I really don’t think it would hurt to streamline some more.  It’s a shame because all of the story elements are really cool, but it is kinda like drinking out of a fire hose.

Grade: B

-Dean Stell

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