News From the Fallout #5 // Review
It starts in the Late Cretaceous Period. Sixty-five million years before the bomb. Kind of an odd place for a story to start of it’s going to be a post-apocalyptic/after-the-bomb sort of thing set in the middle of the 20th century, but there it is..relating a story about something galling to earth. Information that’s going to need to be shared in order for the world to prgress through the eras...until it’s awakened again in News From the Fallout #5. Writer Chris Condon continues a zombies-after-the-bomb series with artist Jeffrey Alan Love.
Sixty-five million years later there’s a group of refugees that have made their way to a place called Dead Water. There’s a gentleman there who is asking them what brings them there. It might seem like a friendly question were it not for the fact that he’s holding them at gunpoint when he asks. Kind of difficult to think straight about a question like that when you’ve got a shtgun pointed at you, but it’s far from an ideal situation for everyone involved. The man holding the shotgun is. ghost haunting a ghost town. So it’s kind of a tense moment.
So...it’s a bit interesting to see the series finally reveal a key component to its lore that’s…essentially a variation on the old Godzilla myth. Nuclear testing unleashes an ancient evil...and rather than it unleashing an ancient radioactive dinosaur it unleahses...a spore. This is sort of an extension of more recent concerns over disease-causing microorganisms that are going to produce...zombies. So it’s a trendy look at an old classic involving anxieties that are a bit more contemporary than 1950s Japan. This particular post-nucelear, post-apocalyptic zombie apocalypse is not without its appeal, but it’s a bit disappointing to see the mystery disrobe enough to reveal that it’s not as original is at might have appeared after the first few issues.
With a bit more of the backstory revealed, it would have been interesting to see a bit more of thw detail on the visuals revealed as well. Instead, it ends up being more of the same with that same striking look at the world through the ghostly nucelar blast shadow-inspired imagery that Love has been working all along. It’s pretty remarkable stuff, but it feels a bit clouded and obfuscated as more and more of the background on the story is revealed. Whiel it amy hve been novel and moody to have the entire story delivered in silhouette for the first few issues, the style of the art begins to feel like a prison as of the fifth issue.
The incarcerating visual feel of New From The Fallout isn’t necssarily a bad thing. The strangeness of life after the bomb was intriguing at first, btut as the full reaility of it settles-in, the intensity beggins to grow increasingly unsettling. This might not lead to a fantastic adventure feeling for the series, but it definitely has a haunting reality about it that resonates quite well beyond the last page of any issue.
