Zombo-Summerween Graphic Novel Review

This book review was written for my annual Summerween Book Club that takes place every June. It's written for those that have read the book so spoilers abound. You've been warned!

As I sit down at my computer, I'm struggling with the exact right way to start this review. I mean, how does one describe what the first volume of Zombo is? Why don't I cheat, just a little? I'll take an excerpt from the Afterword with Al Ewing and Henry Flint's conversation:

FLINT: Zombo. Yes, Zombo. Who is Zombo? That should be the first question.

EWING: Right, try this - Zombo is a half-human, half zombie prototype, created in a government lab in the future as a weapon to use against a previous government weapon which ran amok while attempting to control sentient planets that were killing their colonists and then bringing them back to life as zombies to fight back against the human...hmm. That sounds overly complicated...

And at first I felt the same way. This seems overly complicated. But then...it never ended. It's like the storyline kept trying to one-up itself in terms of satire, ridiculousness, incredulousness, gore, and just plain old bat-shit craziness. At first...I was having trouble picking up what Zombo was putting down. By the time I turned the final page, I was...perplexed. What did I just read? and why did it feel like I had a good time reading it? Reading Zombo is like being hesitant to get on a rollercoaster ride, but allowing yourself to get buckled into the seat anyway. Then, realizing while you're being ratcheted up that first big drop that you really don't want to ride this rollercoaster. By then it's too late. That first big drop, and a couple of twists and turns in, your stomach feels a bit queasy, but you've got to just hang on tight and see it through. You realize about 3/4ths of the way that you're actually having a good time! Once the ride is over and you come to a complete stop you think A) you're alive and B) you had more fun than you thought and now all you wanna' do is go back and do it again.

Yup. That's Zombo.

What helped me appreciate this book more than my initial read was talking it over during our in-person book club meet up. My wife had only read about a fourth of the book and while the rest of us was trying to explain the story beats that she missed out on, we found ourselves cracking up-both at the story as well as her reactions to the wild stuff we were saying. It went a little like this:

• People crash land on a sentient planet that wants to destroy the human race. There are 2 government officials on board that want to make sure you know that your government is your friend. You can trust your government.

• Those two government officials are actually the same person, one was cloned from the other. They're so in sync that they finish each other sentences. Oh and they also slept together, but they did NOTHING WRONG.

• Zombo soon awakes from some sort of cryogenic sleep and is ordered from his government to protect the people that crash landed. You can trust the government.

• The planet soon kills over half of the survivors. Something about Mister Shadow. Then there are mutant cannibals. Zombo faces Mister Shadow head on and discovers that Mister Shadow can't harm him. Zombo can use Mister Shadow as a weapon.

• Then there's a Christmas special being filmed on the planet. Things go badly. Introduce some punkrawkers that film themselves dying in order to get 5 star ratings on a content based website called DeathTube. Enter a Rat-Pack-esque gang who're on some space-ship-planet thingy? Like the Death Star but not evil. It's owned by Hank Epsilon who's a satire of Walt Disney and we're plopped in the middle of an American Idol type reality TV show that's hosted by Myron Snyder who is a satire of Simon Cowell. Enter Zombo. Then enter zombies and soon enough enter zom-bees. No, actual bees-the insects join together to create a zombie. How? I don't even know...and then...

Well, I'm sure you can see where this is going-ANYWHERE! EVERYWHERE!

Here, let's make a quick list of the things that were thrown under the bus: Rambo, the government, the Rat-Pack, Simon Cowell, Russell Brand (I think the "star" at the beginning was supposed to be him), Susan Boyle, Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, YouTube, Social Media, the military, hippies, colonizers, Reality TV, and...maybe bees.

I'm not sure I can give a typical review of book that literally threw everything at the wall and just decided to keep everything: what stuck and what didn't. It's all in here. But let me try to do my best and give you some sort of take away.

Admidst the mayhem there are some really cool ideas in here. One of the ones that stuck with me is the idea of a sentient planet. Some of you may know that I'm a huge Eternals fan, and in Kieron Gillen's run on The Eternals he wrote in the planet Earth as a character. I've always thought that was such a cool idea and I like it in Zombo as well. The way Ewing is using it in Zombo is it's like alien planets are getting revenge against the human race for colonizing them when they never wanted to be colonized. Sound familiar? I thought that really resonated.

The book was originally published in snippets from 2009-2010 (wow, remember when...) and it really shows. A lot of the pop-culture references here date the story and make it a bit of a relic. Al Ewing got his start in the British comics industry with 2000 AD (which was where this was first published) and working on Judge Dredd. It's good to keep that in mind when looking for where the laughs should be as the Brits definitely have a different sense of humor than that the average American.

I first was giving this book the cold shoulder, but the more we talked about it the more things started to hit home. More of the absurdities started to come through, therefore more of the humor and I started to warm up to it. My wife has an affinity for "so-bad-it's-good" movies: a-la Mac and Me or Troll 2. Her reasoning being that these movies were made without too many cooks in the kitchen. It was like the creators were allowed to just do whatever without a studio executive or executives helicoptering over them like paranoid parents. As a result you get some really wild films where it's impossible to guess what will happen next or how things will end. Zombo reads much the same. With so many ideas landing on the page and so much fun being poked at that current moment, it's hard to hate Zombo. It's a marker in time and a ride so wild that you can't help talking about it days after it's done.

8/10

*Next week will be the last book review of Summerween 2026. We'll be reading the graphic novel Influenca by Jade LFT Peters. On the title page we get a bit of a warning: "This comic contains: apocalyptic society, Philadelphia, zombies, blood+non-graphic injury, nudity, sexual situations, boobs!" Who else is excited!? See you back here in a week!