IZombie #18 – Review

By: Chris Roberson (writer), Jay Stephens (guest artist), Laura Allred (colors), Michael Allred (inks on a few pages), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: The back-story of Diogenes, the monster hunter from the Fossor Corporation.

What’s Good: This is a very clean and streamlined story.  IZombie is an enjoyable series, but its Achilles Heel is that it has a lot going on in a typical issue with the action bopping around to visit a large cast of characters in every issue.  Not a problem here.  This issue is really smooth.  The main story thread of I Zombie has introduced us to the characters of Diogenese and Horatio who are monster hunters for the Fossor Corporation.  Diogenes is the old, grizzled vet and this issue gives us our first glimpse into his backstory as we see him when he was a fresh, new agent and he’s teamed with the Fossor’s top agent and sent to Brazil to clear out some vampires.

As you’d expect, the situation is bigger than they anticipated and they get into all kinds of hairy situations.  One of the fun things about this series is that, even though it is very much set in the present-day “real world”, there are these constant vampire infestations, zombie outbreaks, etc. and the Fossor Corporation is there to mop things up.  It kinda has feel like the Men in Black movies where the aliens were everywhere, yet the civilians were so buried in their daily life that they didn’t even notice.  Substitute zombies/vampires/mummies/were-creatures for aliens and you get the idea.

This issue also has some of its trademark fun as exhibited when Diogenes and his mentor track down the vampire nest and meet the “vampire queen”.  What’s awesome is that she isn’t some immortal being who has been a source of myth and legend among the native peoples for centuries. Nope, her origin is more like the vampires in Eugene, Oregon in the main story arc who are just a bunch of University of Oregon graduate students who got bit by vampires and decided to open a paintball facility.  It’s really fun to see a writer just have fun and not be a slave to Bram Stoker.