I've been a fan of Tim Seeley's work since i first checked out his horror movie-themed series Hack/Slash in 2011 and after spending a month in 2013 reading my way through that entire title, I began collecting his latest series, a Rural Noir called Revival, written by Seeley, and illustrated by Mike Norton. As often happens with collections, I ended up with five of these before I got around to reading any past the first volume, and that brings us up-to-date.
This week, I went through the first five collections and this series is pretty darn great. Having been a long-time fan of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead (whether in original comic, adapted television show, or even video game form), I wasn't exactly sure if I wanted to start another comic about the dead rising, but Revival is something entirely different.
Taking place in a fictionalized version of Seeley's hometown of Wausau Wisconsin, the story focuses on police officer Dana Cypress and the events set after "Revival Day", when the dead rose in the area surrounding the town, not as zombies, but apparently as themselves, and (mostly) wanting to get on with the business of living. The series works as a mystery, both on the large scale, as no one know why this specific geographical area has been effected, and on the small scale, involving murders, kidnappings and the types of crimes than can happen in a small town cut off from the rest of the world (Wausau is quickly put under quarantine by the United States Government).
Although the series does have a large number of truly gruesome scenes, much of the story is driven by family drama, Dana works with her father (the town's Sheriff), has a younger sister in college, and an eight-year-old son, each of which has their own secrets and story lines.
A really great series, and one I'm quite happy to have finally gotten around to reading!
Last fall in Library School I took a course on Comic Books and Graphic Novels in public and school libraries, and during that course I wrote a paper on the current stuff at Image Comics.
It's funny because going into the course I knew Image for three titles; Spawn, Savage Dragon, and The Walking Dead (of which I'm a pretty huge fan). Little did I know that the publishing company had a number of other titles I should have been reading.
Number one of them was Hack/Slash - which I spent all of last October focusing on, but after finishing my paper I ended with a large number of titles to check out.
First up was Hack/Slash author Tim Seeley's series Revival. In many ways you can think of it as Images other zombie book.
In the story a small town changes dramatically over the couse of an afternoon when all of the towns dead apparently come back to life. Unlike in Kirkman's The Walking Dead, they aren't mindless killing creatures, but are instead the same people they were before, only a little different.
I really don't want to spoil this series (also it would be hard for me as I've just started it myself), but it does a great job of mixing Gothic Horror with Zombie themes. An awful lot of fun and really compelling stories.
