By Robert Kirkham, Sean Phillips
Genre: Graphic Novel – Superheroes – Horror

This omnibus gets more messed up with every page. I enjoyed it! It definitely hit its stride after the initial outbreak section, when the focus shifts from “how are we going to stop this” to the zombies themselves, and we get to see the people we know and love as heroes become…not even villains, just straight up messed up zombies with superpowers who are desperate to eat everything and anything in their path.

None of them come out of this looking good, and there are some utterly bleak moments, from Hank Pym trapping and carving up T’Challa, to Spider-Man devouring Mary Jane and Aunt May. It’s really grim, and you can tell the writing and drawing process must have been so much fun as they put the heroes in these situations.

From a zombie angle, it actually feels really different and unique, too. Only heroes are affected, meaning the rest of the human race is food. And they cannot die. Quite simply, there is no way to beat them. Most zombie stories focus on a small band of survivors, and though we do get that here, the focus is on the zombies themselves, who do retain some aspect of themselves, are able to speak and quip and are pretty much the same heroes, except with any element that made them ‘good’ stripped away – they have no morality, just a need to feed, and rise to the top of the food chain.

Above all, this graphic novel is a lot of fun, as these superpowered zombies rampage across the universe, discovering fun new things about being zombies, and lose limb after limb after limb. Again, every page is more messed up than the last, and at one point I found myself reading purely to find out what, exactly, happens when these zombies eat meat from their own stomachs, or take on the Silver Surfer.

If you want some Marvel but kind of dark, fun, messy and gory, you might find this is right up your street.

Amazon UK

Bookshop UK

Review by Elle Turpitt

Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt

www.elleturpitt.com

I received this book as a gift.