Zombies vs. Robots #1
Written by Steve Niles, Chris Ryall
Illustrated by Anthony Diecidue, Ashley Wood, Val Mayerick
Published byIDW
Zombies are dead but haven’t stopped moving yet. Just like zombie fiction
Enter IDW’s new, ongoing Zombies vs. Robots series, which places the same old zombies onto a post-nuclear apocalypse Earth that’s under observation by extra-terrestrial intelligence. It’s zombies….in the fuuutuuuure! That the Walkers are arriving en masse from another time stream by way of a portal left open when the nukes fell is the closest it comes to innovating. The zoms are also developing intelligence, which would be novel, but for the fact that George A. Romero, father of all that has come since Night of the Living Dead, covered that rather well a decade ago with Land of the Dead.
Writers Steve Niles and Chris Ryall do far more telling than showing. The poor artists are, for the most part, all but crowded out by the expository ramblings of various robots (the fuuutuuuure!). It’s clumsy stuff that fails to engage. It’s only in the final story (R v Z being a somewhat confusingly rendered anthology piece), “The Orphan Part I”, that we’re not seeing the action unfold under a mountain of verbiage. It’s lean and nearly wordless; which is a relief, but it’s still part of an entirely rote larger narrative.
In a word: “Next!”
