By Max Brooks & Raulo Caceres (Avatar Press/Titan Comics)
ISBN: 987-1-59291-234-6
I’ve never been the keenest consumer of zombie stories but occasionally something really intriguing and different crops up and I’m compelled to re-think my position. Somehow, that usually only occurs when Max Brooks is involved.
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 movies: High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein and the first version of the Producers amongst others.
The guy also loves to play around with the conventions of horror. His previous books include The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z and the graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks.
Now he’s come up with what seems a brilliant “no-brainer†concept that somebody should have had decades ago (and probably did in some old EC horror or DC story, as some veteran fright fan is sure to comment somewhere)…
In his latest charnel confection – a comicbook series from cutting (bleeding?) edge adult publisher Avatar Press – he’s also finally and thankfully returned vampires to their proper place as cold, relentless, loveless apex predators; discarding dubious modern notions of Nosferatu as chaste touchy-feely dreamboats for adolescents or pulchritudinous, perpetually priapic passion pets for hot and horny humans.
Brook’s vampires just kill and kill and kill – as much for fun as for sustenance…
The initial five issue arc of The Extinction Parade introduces us to two such bloodsuckers: haughty, disdainful, distant and aristocratically discrete female night-hunters who have dined on the best, brightest and most dangerous examples of humanity – “solbreeders†– for untold ages.
As such they have often encountered outbreaks of the slow, shambling, stupidly voracious plague-zombies which have periodically broken out amongst the human populations. They always watched with haughty amusement as the brain-dead “Subdead†mindlessly attacked until they’d exhausted their frightened food supply or some king or band of warriors wiped them out. Then the vampires usually hunted the victorious human heroes, assured at least of some thrilling sport…
The saga is set in the exotic technopolises of modern Malay peninsula where the queens of the damned look on and laugh from on high at human inefficiency as Singapore, Sumatra and Sarawak, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma and all points East are ravaged and reduced by a gory tide of unthinking mobile contagion carriers, killing and consuming everyone in their shuddering path…
Blithe and oblivious, the immortal killers carry on their sybaritic bloodletting, glorying in the carnage and delighted that to the ever-expanding wave of subdead biting beasts they are utterly invisible and undetectable. Even these monsters they can destroy with ease and no hint of fear or retaliation…
As city after city, nation after nation, continent after continent succumbs to the plague, all the vampire girls can think of is the opportunity to abandon caution and restraint, indulging in wanton public slaughter: “nights of glory†spent preying on the rapidly declining humans before the stupid but relentless subdead can…
And then with fire and death everywhere an impossible new notion finally sinks into minds stupefied by blood, euphoria and centuries of untouchable, blasé privilege…
With all parts of Earth accessible as never before, with the subdead multiplying with every bite and no sense of preservation or the future, what will vampires eat when there are no humans left?
To be fair, their daylight caretaker Willem tried to tell them repeatedly that this time something was different, but when have vampires ever listened to servants or humans? The first inkling the spoiled bloodsuckers have of a real problem is the night their major domo is not there when they awake from their red-spattered repose…
The pitifully few undead elite gather to watch an inexorable tide wipe out what might be the last vestiges of humanity in the city, and rage and frustration and perhaps fear grip the shell-shocked dowagers of doom. Without thinking they explode into action, tearing apart the unthinking oblivious subdead shamblers.
Tirelessly, methodically they dismember and destroy the Zombie pack. It is a turning point in the history of the undead. The vampires will war with the unthinking eaters for the right to consume mortals.
However, the battle has highlighted a disturbing fact: vampires are not completely immune to the taint that drives zombies to mindless endless hunger…
To Be Continued…
Narrated in an effective first person narrative with bleak deadpan delivery, this is also a visceral, visual gorefest from illustrator Raulo Caceres that no lover of shock-horror could resist. This luxurious full colour paperback compilation also includes a seventeen page covers-&-variants gallery plus a scarlet-spattered eleven page preview of forthcoming volume The Extinction Parade: War.
The Extinction Parade ™ & © 2014 Max Brooks.