Reading – A Very Zombie Christmas
This 32-page comic from Antarctic Press, A Very Zombie Christmas gives us three zombie-themed short comics set during the Christmas season. A B&W horror comic, I grabbed this yesterday at Austin Books for two reasons:
- The cover, by Lee Duhig, looked great. How could I turn down a comic with Zombie Santa on the cover?
- The artwork in the first story, “Unholy Night” written and illustrated by Joseph Wight, really grabbed me, making me think of the old Creepy comics* of the sixties (I’ve been reading the collections and loving them).
Anyway, let’s take a quick look at each of the short comics in the book.
“Unholy Night,” by Joseph Wight
A WWII story that feels a hell of a lot like a Creepy or Eerie tale, “Unholy Night” gives us an American squad getting overrun by zombies on Christmas Eve. This is my favorite story in the book and it’s also the longest, weighing in at 15-pages. The story feels like it could have come straight out of an old Creepy or Eerie comic (and is actually better than what I’ve read in Dark Horse’s new Creepy comic series), with a great ending that’s punctuated with a change in the story’s style of art. This is the first bit of work I’ve seen by Wight, but this is good enough that I want to track down some of his other comics. Any recommendations?
“The Littlest Zombie Meets Santa,” by Fred Perry
Here we get a story as far from Wight’s story as possible. A cutesy story in which a young zombie child goes into the forest in search of food (the big zombies don’t let him eat people because they eat all of the flesh before he can get to it) and finds some yummy, yummy brains. This story is definitely Christmas-themed, since Santa actually does make an appearance at the end. Just in time for his end . . .
“You Better Watch Out,” by David Hutchison
A group of mobsters decide to dress as Santa and then pull a heist. And then, in classic EC tradition, there’s a cruel backstab that eventually finds its way to a twist ending. The art’s pretty good, and the story was good, though the entire story feels just a tad rushed (probably to fit into its eight page length.
Closing Thoughts
I’m happy I grabbed this comic. $3.50 is a great price for three short, fun zombie comics. And the Christmas theme (even if it’s pretty thin on the first story) makes this a great buy for anyone looking for some Christmas zombie action. Out of all of the stories the first one is best, though I’ll also look for more work by Fred Perry since his twisted sense of humor and quirky art style appeals to me.
Recommended reading for the holidays. Hit your local comic store and grab a copy before they close down for Christmas day. And at $3.50 you may want to grab a few extra copies to hand out to your zombie-loving friends.
(And if I’m lucky someone over at Antarctic Press will figure out what they’ve got here and start their own Creepy-style comic series. What I’ve seen here makes me think they could outperform Dark Horse in this department.)
For another opinion don’t miss this review at Comic Monsters where Decapitated Dan says:
“There is really only one way to sum this issue up, it’s just an amazing anthology. I know that non-horror readers wonder how the zombie genre has not worn thin yet, and this book is a great example on why it hasn’t. The stories are solid and the artwork is high above the bar. This is not what I expected when buying this issue but I am so pleased with what I got. This one is a must buy on my Christmas list.”
Pretty much exactly my reaction. I bought the A Very Zombie Christmas comic expecting a throwaway comic that I’d read once and then toss into a box. What I got was an unexpected treat and a peek at a creator — Joseph Wight — who I need to take some time to learn more about.
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