I apologize for the lateness of this review, but as seen in the previous post, the ZRC has been quite busy with travel plans.  We shall bring the fight for Zombie Rights to the grey, damp Autumn campus of Indiana University in a mere five days.  Can you feel the excitement?

On to the topic of the day, however: the second issue of the special Marvel Zombie event, Marvel Zombies Return.  This issue features Iron Man, and more of Marvel’s trademark gory Undead-bashing, unfortunately.  Details below the cut.

MZ Returns: Iron Man takes place on what is now dubbed Earth-Z, which is a sort of pastiche of late 60s/early 70s Marvel. Spiderman, as we saw in the last issue, was still in college on this world, and in this edition we meet Earth-Z’s Tony Stark, currently wallowing in his worst alcoholic phase, about to sell Stark International to ‘the Chinese’ for a ton of cash he can blow on liquor. Pepper Potts is about to walk out on him, and his whole world is falling apart, when Zombie Giant Man appears in the basement of Stark International, looking for a macguffin that Tony has in his possession. Soon enough, hordes of so-called Zombies are running amok, and Stark has to fight the shakes long enough to save the world. Sort of.

This part of the big MZ Returns event was written by Monster Island scribe and noted anti-zombie author David Wellington, who helped to popularize the new wave of Zombie popular fiction that you see flooding the bookstores in the last couple of years. Unfortunately, while Wellington’s writing might be slick and postmodern, it is far from progressive in the area of Undead Equality.

Now, it’s not terribly relevant to the ZRC, but your humble ZRC President here is a long-time hater of Iron Man, and I get an enormous sense of schaudenfreud watching good old Tony drowning in his rye, vodka, moonshine, what have you… so there are parts of this comic that are quite funny, up until, predictably enough, the Zombie stereotypes arrive to ruin everyone’s day.

It could be the result of each issue having a different author, but the Marvel Undead in this Iron Man comic differ from the previous Spiderman creatures in several respects, having been reduced to animalistic flesh chewing, staggering automatons, instead of the intelligent-but-amoral creatures from the last issue.

Adding insult to injury, the intro to the Marvel Zombies comics now states that the Marvel Zombies are ‘soulless’, which I felt was completely uncalled for. On top of lifeist prejudice we have to add religious persecution as well?

Once the Marvel Zombies get loose, it’s a fairly predictable sequence of chewing, slaughter, blood, more slaughter, a few witty jokes and then a big To Be Continued. Now, I wasn’t optimistic to begin with, but these
Marvel Zombies Return comics take us to the gutter Fred Van Lente excavated in Marvel Zombies 3-4 and start digging themselves deeper. With a backhoe. Marvel seems determined to dominate the Living Supremacist comic demographic in the forseeable future, despite the positive steps forward it took with Deadpool… and that’s a damn shame.

Tags: Comics, Review

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. 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.