I finally got around to reading this. What an overrated book! Time Magazine called it one of the best graphic novels of 2007 - WHAT?!. I found it never really got off the ground storywise, the humor didn’t work, and it was just trying way too hard to gross you out to the point of :rolleyes:. The art was pretty poor for a major title, too. The teeth on the outside didn’t really work for me, and especially the people on the spaceship orbiting Earth looked like characters from the early '90s.
I know this book has lots of hardcore fans. Explain yourselves, please!
The first part was OK but yeah, kind of overrated. Don’t read the second part. Way worse in terms of storyline. Dead Days was OK and Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness was pretty good.
I think the main lesson here may be: Don’t go to Time magazine for graphic novel reviews.
If we’re thinking of the same list, the #1 “graphic novel” was a webcomic, and the #10 “graphic novel” was a treasury of Peanuts strips from the 1950’s. If you’ve got to stretch your definition of “graphic novel” that far just to fill up a Top 10 list, then maybe you really don’t need to be compiling the list to begin with.
As for Marvel Zombies itself, I don’t think there’s really anything much there to explain. Once upon a time, in the 1970’s, “Marvel Zombies” was a nickname for the hardcore Marvel fans. Three decades later, long after the demise of the Comics Code, society suddenly realized that everything could be improved simply by adding zombies. In hindsight, the series was inevitable.
Could it have been done better? Probably not; the basic concept is “zombie superheroes.” It can’t be done seriously, yet it’s not particularly funny either. Ultimately the quasi-Sam Raimi “gore-comedy” approach was probably the only workable choice available. It’s no coincidence that Bruce Campbell’s Evil Dead character eventually showed up.
ETA: Now that I think about it, they probably could have done it better. I don’t think they had any plans to revisit the setting to begin with.
I think you’re setting your definition too narrowly there, but I can’t argue that mainstream media isn’t really great when it comes to such things. If it were up to them semi-autobiographical stories of whiny twenty-something slackers would be the only thing of note.
It worked for the first Ultimate FF story as an episode in an ongoing series. And the mini-series was good in the sense of being a decent “What If” story. But even there it was over-extended as a five issue story. By now they’ve stretched this one single idea over twenty issues and they’re apparently planning on crossing it over into the Marvel mainstream. Just let it go.
As far as I’ve seen, the best thing to come out of the idea was the bit from Ultimate Fantastic Four. I’ve read a rumour that Doctor Doom makes a noble last stand in the zombie universe, which could be cool, but I haven’t read it personally.
It already has, in a “six degrees of separation” kind of way: Zombie!Wolverine showed up in Exiles, a comic about a team which has already visited the mainstream Marvel universe a few times.
I think I might’ve liked it if it had been 2 issues, but 5 was just shameless padding. It had countless unnecessary 2-page spreads, and very little dialogue. This could’ve been acceptable if the art was something to look at, but it wasn’t.
Have any of you zombie haters read Kirkman’s The Walking Dead? Think of it as an extension of Romero’s Zombieverse. It is mainly about the small group of survivors with the zombies serve as a backdrop. An excellent comic series. I think the TPB’s are up to volume 9 or 10.
I would imagine it’s the first thing a “zombie hater” would read before declaring their hate. It’s hard to talk to a comic book reader or walk into a shop (or, hell, read a website) without having it shoved in your face. It’s mediocre, IMO. A very far cry from what I personally would call an excellent comic series. Now Kirkman’s Battle Pope, on the other hand . . .
I’ve read bits of Marvel Zombies. I like superheroes. I like zombies. It had some good moments, but some really awful ones.
Good moment: where Zombie Fantastic Four escape from their prison by Reed pretending to build a teleporter out of hair and ink, but really only turning invisible.
Bad moment: Zombies eat Galactus, then eat each other, then eat everything else in the universe. WTF? Six invincible zombies does not a good zombie story make.
Shark jump, anyone?
But The Walking Dead focuses its story on the human survivors. Marvel Zombies focuses its story mostly on the zombies. And let’s face it, zombies don’t really have a story: they walk around and eat everyone they see, then they walk so more until they see somebody else, and then they eat them. You run that for twenty issues and you’re really stretching it thin.
And sorry, AllWalker, but I have to disagree with you. The escape was where the series lost me. It was a dumb scene. Unless those guards had been specially recruited to be the stupidest people on Earth, there’s no way they would have fallen for a plan that stupid.
That was Magneto, and yeah, that was a very cool moment. I’ve never read any of the zombie stuff after that, never really wanted to. The Ultimate FF arc was really good though.
My favorite is still the all time best quote by Spider man:
I ATE MARY JANE! He laments over and over through the entire first series as he’s guilt ridden. It’s great and Hilarious over and over. (He also ate Aunt May and regrets that too).
Though I remember the big appeal was that it’s filled with inside references to past comics most notably by their Zombifing the classic covers throughout the ages and things like that.
Fair enough. I liked it because the guards were so dumb, that and they are almost lampshading themselves a bit. I mean, Richard has done everything short of using a single hair as a keyboard.
