The Zombie Rights Campaign, in its efforts to keep informed about treatment of zombies in society and depictions of the differently animated in the media, consumes a wide variety of entertainment products.  Sadly, those with an uplifting and positive message for the living dead are few and far between.

The recently concluded Marvel Zombies 4 is not one of them.

Marvel Zombies 4 is the direct sequel to Marvel Zombies 3, both of which were written by Fred Van Lente.  In the Marvel Multiverse  there is an alternate universe where a zombie ‘plague’ turned all the world’s superheroes into vicious, amoral carnivores who devoured and/or destroyed the entire world(related in various crossovers and Marvel Zombies 1 and 2).  In Marvel Zombies 3, a small group of these superhuman undead attempted to access the main Marvel Universe and were repulsed by a new secret organization with a silly acronym, set up to be like the Men in Black of parallel universes.

Marvel Zombies 4 takes place shortly thereafter, when a team is assembled to track down two zombies who escaped during the events of MZ3: one, a voodoo zombie character out of Marvel’s past named Simon Garth, and another, the decapitated head of a zombified Deadpool from the alternate universe.

Sure enough, a zombie plague follows, along with copious gore and violence and mayhem, as this team of would be ‘heroes’ tracks and persecutes the two zombies, who are only looking for a place to call their own.  Zombie Deadpool in particular is a rare bright spot in this comic, having reformed and renounced his flesh devouring ways, he now wants merely to obtain a place to live and some gainful employment.  These noble sentiments are naturally ignored by the world at large.

Various supernatural and superpowered events and devices drive the story, which concludes, for what it’s worth, in an unsatisfying and confusing matter, even putting Van Lente’s apparent lifeist prejudice aside.  About the only redeeming feature of this series is that Zombie Deadpool gets to costar in his own spinoff series, “Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth”, set after the events of MZ4.  Could we finally see a zombie comic from Marvel that features a charismatic zombie protagonist?

The Zombie Rights Campaign will keep you informed.

Tags: Comics

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 10:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.