THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

In 1968, the dead rose from their graves - we saw them mercilessly assault a farmhouse in the hit movie Night of the Living Dead, but, the question remains, was this an isolated incident or global catastrophe? The '68 comic series tells the story of the Vietnam War, now filled with Zombies - a event of such magnitude from 1968, miles away from that isolated farmhouse in Pennsylvania, reimagined for a world where the dead no longer die, returning to life as shambolic, mindless undead, desiring nothing other than to eat human flesh. The first volume tells the story of the unhappy few who discover this new horror in an already horrific war and catalogues their desperate struggle to defend a jungle firebase, halting the wandering dead before they spread throughout the entire world.

MY VERDICT:

I bought this comic without much knowledge about it - I was on the hunt for a Zombie comic, landing on the '68 series first - and, after blazing from cover to cover, am pleasantly surprised by its quality. First of all, the setting and theme of the series sits excellently with the Zombie genre - not least because it expands the universe of George Romero's groundbreaking film, Night of the Living Dead. Zombies seem to suit the Vietnam War astonishingly well, matching the fairly squalid and dirty nature of the war that was reported. Also, since Zombies do not discriminate, taking both Viet Cong and US soldiers, the undead plague also mimics the sense of "victor-less war" - the phrase that many historians and political busybodies have labelled the war in Vietnam as being. In terms of the actual comic itself though, I did enjoy reading. The story is nice and focused - pretty much staying with the US army unit defending the firebase. It does branch out in places, revealing some background information about the rest of the world, even referencing the events of Night of the Living Dead, and does stray into real events that actually took place within Vietnam - helpfully explained in a special section at the end of the volume. The only perhaps downside of this comic is that it did take a bit of getting used to the art-style; the artist is great at drawing Zombies - true undead monsters in the style of Romero's movies, sporting piles of gut-wrenching detail - but is, in my opinion, not as excellent at drawing living human characters.