The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks


By Max Brooks & Ibraim Roberson (Duckworth)
ISBN:  978-0-71563-815-6

I’ve never been the biggest fan of zombie stories but occasionally something really tasty comes along and I’m forced to re-evaluate my position. Such an item is this truly impressive little graphic novel from the writer of World War Z and the Zombie Survival Guide.

Max Brooks is a successful actor and screenwriter (most notably part of the team scripting Saturday Night Live) and cartoon fans might recognize his name from the voice credits of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Batman Beyond and Justice League. You probably laughed at a lot of his dad’s movie’s like High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein and the first version of the Producers.

As with his previous books the story is told with devastating, deadpan delivery in a documentary manner, with sparse captions and no dialogue, but the superb, tonal black and white artwork of Brazilian Ibraim Roberson transforms this compendium of “authenticated” undead attacks and assorted government’s cover-ups into a truly chilling catalogue of near-disasters.

The Living Dead are animated by a virus millions of years old, transmitted when a sufferer bites a victim. It can be found in every corner of the Earth, and these deadly dozen outbreaks clearly show how lucky we’ve been thus far.

These vignettes depict Us versus Them from Central Africa in 60,000BC to Joshua Tree National Park in 1992AD, via Egypt 3000BC, Scotland 121AD (just before Hadrian built that wall), the Central Pacific in 1579 (on one of Sir Francis Drake’s voyages), in Siberia, 1583, Japan 1611, on a Portuguese slave-ship in 1690, St. Lucia in 1862, a Foreign Legion fortress in 1893, China during Japan’s campaign during WWII, and at a Soviet science station during the Cold War, and the restrained matter-of-fact tone of the pieces make them some of the most gripping horror fiction I’ve ever seen.

Just keep telling yourself “Zombies don’t exist” and you’ll be fine.

Probably.
© 2009 Max Brooks. All Rights Reserved.