I'm a sucker for zombies. I'm sure books have been written about the allure of the zombie genre, about the base human fears and interests that cause this fascination in the walking dead. I'll leave that to people smarter than me. I just think zombies are interesting. A lot of people seem to agree with me, and a lot of those people create comics. As with any issue of the zombie genre, this one demonstrates good and bad aspects, which, in the end, makes it fairly average.

"The War at Home, Part Two: Blood and Ice Cream, A View of the Zoo"
Writer: Joe R. Lansdale
Artist: Eduardo Barreto
Patients and a buxom nurse defend a hospital against attacking zombies. There's really not much else you need to know and not much else really happens. The art and writing are perfectly fine, just not all that interesting beyond normal zombie fare. Perhaps that will change as the series progresses, but for right now that's all it is.

"Double Portrait"
Writer: Christine Boylan
Artist: Hanzo Steinbach
I judge one-and-done 8 page stories differently than full length stories because it seems nearly impossible to tell a good story with such limited space. And while "Double Portrait" doesn't exactly break the mold of zombie stories, it does a good job of covering a lot of ground in a few pages. Our main character, an artist simply known as Clyde, meets a fairly typical end, but we get nice glimpses of how he got to that point – again, all in just 8 pages. The art is nice, too.

"Zounds"
Writer: Todd Lepre
Artist: Chee
One would think I'd be even more impressed with a one-and-done 6 page story. Sadly, that's not the case. The artwork is great, but the story of zombies who have been trained to recite Shakespeare just didn't appeal to me. I suppose that I can't wrap my brain around the process that had to be involved going into this story, probably because it seemed that the time and effort spent getting zombies to repeat certain words in a certain order could probably be used to teach them things like, say, not attacking humans, and that's not even considering what their teachers could have been doing with all that time. I appreciate the sentiment--the idea that we need culture to survive the apocalypse--but I don't think the story itself supported that ideal.

I'm happy that there appears to be a market for zombie stories (as evidenced by the fact that this title started as a series of specials and is now an ongoing). I think, right now, we're seeing such an influx of undead related stories that it's watering down the concept. Hopefully, over time, we'll see the crème rise to the top. While this issue wasn't amazing, I expect those top end stories will eventually find their home in Zombie Tales.

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