I, Zombie #11 – Review

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

The Story: Kinda a wrapping up story as many loose ends are secured.

What’s Good: Roberson and Allred have done a yeoman’s job of world building over the first eleven issues of I, Zombie.  It hasn’t always been smooth, but I do feel like with this issue, they finally have all of their game pieces out on the board such that they can play with them.  That may seem a little strange: “How can it take 11 issues just to get organized?”  Well, this world is complex.  You have zombies, were-beings, vampires, ghosts, possessed beings and a few others.  On top of that there is a secret society of monster hunters that features prominently.  And….none of these creature types is exactly what you’ve grown used to from other fictional works.

Of course, Gwyn, the cute and coherent zombie (who merely needs to eat one brain per month to remain cute and coherent) is one great example of the novel spin on the undead archetypes.  But there are many others…  For example, we learn in this issue that the vampire chicks who were running the paintball club (and sucking just a little blood on the side) were until very recently a bunch of graduate students at the University of Oregon.  As readers, we’re so used to vampires all being world-weary, 800 year old Viking kings and the story being about how they are people-out-of-time, that this is a very fresh take.  These young ladies have been vampires for a couple of months and are just getting the hang of it

And, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have art duties from the Allreds with letters by Todd Klein.  I think if you’d put worse artists on this series, I may have dropped it a few times when the story got too complex, but the Allreds’ soft and lively art helps me just skate on through.  I’ve made my positive feelings for the Allreds’ art know in multiple places on this site, so let’s spend a moment talking about Mr. Klein’s lettering.  Lettering is really becoming a lost art form today.  You get to see great hand lettered works sometimes (anything John Workman works on), but a LOT of lettering these days is nothing special: boring fonts, word balloons that are WAY oversized, etc.  I’m 99% sure that Klein does computer lettering, but his work just shows that someone approached the lettering with the same care that was used on the art or the scripts.  It is hard to describe, but the lettering almost has a softness that echoes the art.