IZombie #21 – Review

By: Chris Roberson (writer), J. Bone (guest artist), Laura Allred (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: Gwyn the zombie gets hooked up with the Dead Presidents and Galatea’s plans start to make more sense.

Four Things: 

1. Nifty guest art by J. Bone. – Whoah! Wasn’t expecting this…  Guest art is a fact of life in comics and it’s nothing new either (go back and read those old X-Men comics and you’ll find lots of guest artists).  What’s neat about this J. Bone appearance is that it isn’t on a done-in-one issue that explains some back-story item even though that seems to be the popular way to use guest artists.  Nope….this guest art happens smack in the middle of a story arc.  A couple of things are cool about this…..  For one thing, J. Bone’s art is a lot of fun.  He’s much more of a cartoonist than Michael Allred is and that means that his storytelling is crisp and clear because he can do all the exaggerated body language stuff.  But he has that same economy of line that Allred has, so the even though the shape of the characters is a little different….it’s still a similar overall look.  You could probably convince me that Allred drew this when someone dared him to draw like Bruce Timm or something.  The other thing this shows is what a wonderful job the Allreds did of designing the characters.  Between their colors and their identifying features, it’s never a problem recognizing our favorite characters even with a very different art style.

2. Consistent coloring is so important. – This issue really makes you appreciate how important coloring and consistent coloring is in comics.  Even though the line-art duties have changed for this issue, by keeping Laura Allred on the colors, this book looks and feels like I Zombie.  Obviously coloring is important (duh!), but a big part of identifying some of these characters lies in the color.  For Gwyn it’s all about her hair and skin tone.  For Galatea’s vampire helper, it’s all in the red hair and the GREEN Oregon Ducks sweatshirt (LOVE that red/green combo).  I doubt this would have worked as well if they’d brought in a new colorist for this issue and just given them the color palate that Mrs. Allred uses.