’68 #3 – Review

By Mark Kidwell (story), Nat Jones (pen and inks), Jay Fotos (colors) and Jason Arthur (letters)

The Story: What’s worse than being ordered to fight in-country at the height of the Vietnam War? Being ordered to fight in-country at the height of the Vietnam War…with zombies. What the troops there can’t know yet, of course, is that the zombie plague has spread…and there’s a good chance that no one will have a home to go back to.

What’s Good: God I love this series. Not only does Kidwell move deftly between military drama and outright horror, he captures the essence of time and place so well. Whether it’s in the middle of a Vietnamese jungle outpost, or a campus protest in California, the way Kidwell is able to establish the period so well lends a fantastic verisimilitude to the story that helps immensely when the dead start attacking.

Jay Fotos continues to do an excellent job on the artwork, although he has less to work with in this issue than he has in the past. (Lush, dark jungle and looming military equipment seem to provide better atmospheric fodder than a brightly lit college campus.) The scenes of zombie attacks are quite gruesome, though it never feels excessively so. It would be nice if things were a bit more varied (even something as cringe inducing as zombies chowing down on someone’s innards gets old if its in too many panels), but I feel like that’s nitpicking.

’68 #1 – Review

By Mark Kidwell (story), Nat Jones (pen and inks), Jay Fotos (colors), Jason Arthur (letters)
The Story: Summarizing the plot of a Vietnam-era war story by saying “things go wrong” might sound redundant. And in a normal Vietnam era war story, it might be. But not in ’68, oh no. In THIS Vietnam era war story, things go wrong…with zombies.

What’s Good: Let me start by saying that I’m not one of those people who’ll love something just because you put a zombie in it. I have no problem with zombies, don’t get me wrong, but the whole glut of early-aught movies dealing with them was more than enough for me. That said: holy. Crap.

I picked up this comic after doing a double take at the amazing B cover (the zombified version of the famous Vietcong execution photo). I literally just stared at it for a couple of seconds, sitting innocently there in the shelf, surrounded by the all the (comparatively) bright, happy super hero books I had come into the shop to buy. The real version of that photo is horrifying enough, both because of what it portrays and because of what it symbolizes. But this cover…this cover took that terrible image…and somehow made it worse. Perhaps more oddly, it didn’t have the (usually fairly obvious) stink of gimmick or exploitation that so many of these zombie mash-up projects have.

This becomes even clearer on reading the issue itself. I hesitate to go as far as to say that there’s a deeper, metaphorical significance to the zombies, but there is a distinct lack of the “gee whizz, cool, let’s blow up the undead with our machine guns and rockets!” sentiment that pervades so many zombie stories. This is far, far more Walking Dead than it is Zombieland. It’s unceasingly dark, extremely violent and (particularly in the tunnel-rat sequence, which I think will haunt my dreams for at least the next week) absolutely terrifying. The strong writing and stark, detailed artwork only serve to enhance and build on the mood.