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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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At the risk of spoiling it for you, the plot is all in the title:
Dead West is Zombies in The Old West, aping the visual appeal
of Tony Moore's early Walking Dead art, with a somewhat anemic
script that fails to either engage or entertain.
Why are there zombies in the old west? Spears tries to introduce some
political relevance about the destruction of the Native American
people, but there's not enough weight to the culture's depiction to
give the reader the sense that Spears cares much about the subject
beyond the most facile elements. There's some magical ritual hinted
at, but again, this is all fairly lightweight window dressing to get
to the, you'll pardon the pun, meat of the story, those Zombies
in The Old West.
There are good people and bad people in the town this all takes place
in ("Lazarus," get it? Ha ha ha, Lazarus!), and a pregnant prostitute
who gives birth during the course of the story. But for the most part,
the characters are all ciphers and I was left not caring one way or
the other if they got shot or eaten by zombies. The only death in the
book -- and the only moment that had any real emotional resonance for
me -- was the hanging of the father of the prostitute's child. The
cruelty of the sheriff and the plight of the prostitute and her unborn
child have enough emotional and narrative weight that I wish the
sequence had been saved for a better story.
Spears and G probably thought they had a better work on their hands
than Dead West ultimately proves to be; I honestly wish I liked
it more, as it clearly is meant to do more than merely cash in on the
current cross-genre craze. But the script is not fully developed
enough to bring the book above average -- there's an entire,
apparently important sequence at the end that I simply could not
decode the significance of, and G's art wildly veers from the
accomplished to the indistinct -- a scene introducing a Gatling Gun
into the conflict fails mightily because the people drawn behind the
gun are given more weight, detail and prominence than the
poorly-sketched gun. Any good editor could have explained this to the
artist and had it fixed. The last page seems meant to convey depth and
a sense of closure, but all I see is inky blobs that look like an
idea for the final page.
As I said, I wish I liked Dead West more than I do. But in the
past few years I've read and watched a lot of good zombie stories, and
I'm not even particularly fond of the subgenre. So for me to get
really excited about yet another zombie tale in the wake of movies
like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn
of the Dead, or comics like Walking Dead and
Remains, it's going to have to rise above average. Dead
West tries to do that, but an unconvincing script, problems in the
art and an overall sense that the story is twice as long as it needs
to be keep it from meeting that standard. Grade: 3/5
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Dead West