Remains by Steve Niles is a 5 issue mini-series comic that has been turned into a graphic novel and a televised movie. With the release coming out soon I felt we needed to take a look at the mini-series that started it all so I picked up the graphic novel and have to say it’s been a waste of my time – NOT ORDERING IT SOONER!
I do have to say I was a bit thrown off by the introduction. The art didn’t blow me away and I wasn’t sold by how the undead were born. (A nuclear blast that wiped out most of the world but people in the range of those that were killed and turned that seemed to be 100% ok?) The cause of this blast? Someone who set off the explosion early and appears to become the first of the undead and is able to speak. Still aside from the logistics of the problems that were brought up in the intro I reminded myself I was reading a comic, moved on, and happily so because once that was over we were given an enjoyable story.
While I did find it enjoyable I won’t lie. The art gets better but isn’t as clean as *I* prefer (not saying it’s bad it’s just not my style) and I felt the story, while a fun read, felt incomplete (possibly rushed due to there only being 5 issues to this mini-series.)
We’re following an ex-blackjack dealer and an exotic dancer who happened to be spending some quality time alone together in the vault of one of the casinos when the nuclear holocaust mentioned above was busy killing and re-animating everyone. Apparently they must have been in there for awhile as when they emerged the casino that they were in was empty and yet they were still perfectly OK.
We flash forward a bit here a we see that Vegas is still their home and they have cleared out most of the major hotels in their area to be zombie free and setup an elaborate zip line system between the buildings to safely move back and forth between them. Everything seems to be going OK until one day they notice that the zombies seem to be eating each other and from this – growing intelligent. This intelligence is actually heralding the coming of the zombie king and the end of the peace that these two have been able to create for themselves.
Available on Amazon
