Everything Dead and Dying #2 // Review
The man introduces himself as Sam. Sam Jeffries. He damn near tries to shake hands witht he stranger over a corpse. That would be strange enough if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s trying to shake hands over the corpse of a man that he’s just killed. So naturally the man he’s trying to introduce himself to isn’t going to be all that happy about the siatution even if Sam IS trying to be polite in Everything Dead and Dying #2. Writer Tate Brombal and artist Jacob Phillips construct a tight, little horror. drama that rests remarkably well between two covers. Color comes to the page courtesy of Pip Martin.
The corpse of the man wa once alive. Somewhere between being shot in the head and and being alive, there was a chacne that he might have been a zombie. (Otherwise Sam wouldn’t have shot him in the first place. This IS a zombie apocalypse sort of a situation after all.) There’s something a bit strange aobut the whole situation, though. Maybe it’s the ffact that this particular man...the man who Sam is introducing himself to...has been apparently on his own for quite some time. Sam assumes that the man in question has been alone the whole time. He hasn’t. And he’s about to understand just how wrong he is about his assumptions.
Brombal deftly plays with expectations and complexities in a story that manages to find some new life in a tred, old zombie apocalypse trope. George Romero found some remarkalby striking statements on the nature of society when he essentially invented the concept of the modern szombie. Every now and again someone manages to strike just the zombie horror genre from just the right angle. The zombie concept is a remarkably sharp and insightful tool in which to peer into human consciousness...Brombal nails that insight with a cunning brilliance in a very sharply-rendered story.
Phillips finds equal footing for serious interpersonal drama and grizzly, gloody horror. Both drama and horror hit the page with the same kind of emotional impact from completely different directions that feel equally disturbing. It’s an approach to the art that dances really closely with the script as it slowly and soulfully moves through the nightmare from cover to cover. It’s all quite intense and it all feels remarkably fresh. There’s even a bit of beauty in it around the edges of action.
There’s some very clever themtic elelments that are being written into the substance of Brombal’s story. It all feels so remarkable well-executed on so many levels. It’s refreshing to know that the zobmie genre still has some life in tit after all of these years. Braombal has done a remarkable job of bringing that life to the page in a deeply engaging sort of a story that crawls right into the heart of horror and finds its way into a very c ozy kind of shadow that explores the nature of human connection and the driving need for human survival at all costs.
