While we were in Bloomington, Indiana for The Dark Carnival Film Festival, the art director and I stopped at landmark Bloomington comic book store The Vintage Phoenix for a bit of window shopping, as we usually do when we’re in the neighborhood.

(It really is a fantastic old-school comic book store with an extensive indie selection and even a decent toy/merchandise room. Makes those soulless Comic Carnival places look like the place fun goes to die)

While there I saw, and was compelled by ZRC interests to purchase a trade paperback for review, entitled ‘Victorian Undead’, with a prominent subtitle:

‘Sherlock Holmes vs. Zombies!’

Oh boy.

First of all, it is, as they say, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. This is a Sherlock Holmes story set in Victorian London where he fights the Undead. Sometimes with Zombie products what you get is not precisely what’s advertised; Fulci’s landmark Zombi 2 wasn’t a sequel of any kind, for example, and who on earth knows what ‘evil’ is supposed to be ‘resident’ where in Resident Evil. (The game was originally titled Biohazard in Japan, which makes a lot more sense).

Here though, you get precisely what you should expect. Actually, given the nature of hurried Zombie tie-ins lately, you probably get a better executed version than you were expecting. Victorian Undead is fairly well drawn and colored, the writing feels like a Holmes story without being too intentionally antiquated, and there are some very nice touches here and there that help establish a Victorian setting and sensibility. Things move along pretty well, there are neither too few nor too many characters to keep track of, and Holmes fans will find at least a few appropriate references to the actual Arthur Conan Doyle works to chew on.

As for the rest, however… uggh.

Victorian Undead opens in 1854, when London is witness to a comet breaking up over the city, glowing ominously green as it does so. You can guess what this means; ‘Zombie’ Attack!

Flash forward to 1898, and Holmes and Watson are investigating a crime ring that seems to be brainwashing and then plundering wealthy men with discreet but dangerous appetites. When Holmes goes to bust the perpetrator, he discovers that it is, in fact, a clockwork automaton acting as stand-in. He manages to best the contrivance, but is a bit off-put by the fact that whoever was operating it remotely seemed to know him too well… The investigative duo are then called to their next case, a gruesome murder in the construction site of a new line of the London Underground, whose perpetrator has unexpectedly come back to life with a ravenous hunger for… well, you get the idea.

From there on it’s Holmes working to uncover the plot, a sinister nemesis from his past (no points for guessing that it is, in fact, Moriarty) working to raise an army of the Undead, and chaos and violence ensue, all while clever rationation leads to a second life and death (or perhaps life and Undeath) confrontation between the two supergeniuses.

Meanwhile, you know who suffers? The Zombies, that’s who. They always seem to get caught in the middle of these conflicts. Undead Moriarty has plans to use an Undead army to stage a revolution against the English government, which it is revealed has been persecuting the Differently Animated for over forty years in secret, even developing 19th century grade doomsday devices to fight them. Moriarty frames it as less of an apocalypse and more of a social uprising, though of course he improved the process of Zombification a bit for himself, granting him some kind of superpowered control over the rest of the Undead, who are treated most shabbily by both sides. I mean, yes, so you’ve come back from the dead and you’re both hungry and green. So what? Since when is that so wrong? Why should you have to choose between involuntary servitude at the hands of the Napoleon of Crime or extermination at the hands of the Worlds’ Greatest Detective?

Call me biased, but I think that the real (as in original) Sherlock Holmes would be far more open-minded. In the original works, Holmes works for all manner of clientele, and takes any case that strikes his fancy. He wouldn’t care if you were a Zombie, a Living person, or some sort of lycanthrope, so long as you had a fascinating mental puzzle to work out.

(Well… unless you were a Mormon.)

Holmes was also far less fond of violence than he is depicted here; whereas in this comic he often wades into whole mobs of Zombies with a wicked looking sort of a cross between a machete and a short sword, in the old stories he left the limited application of violence to Dr. Watson and his trusty revolver for the most part. Reason was supposed to triumph, after all, not force of arms.

Here his legendary detective skills are mostly used to figure out where, precisely, the next slaughter of the Differently Animated is to be staged, a long series of bloodbaths leading up to the final showdown between Moriarty and his Empire of the Dead and good old England and its champion, Mr. Holmes.

For indulging in vicious Anti-Zombie stereotypes and for placing the Undead squarely in the crossfire of a power struggle between these two fearsome intellects, not to mention just an appalling amount of Zombie blood and gore, the ZRC gives this comic our lowest rating and thusly designates it as Living Supremacist.

Tags: Comics, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 9:44 pm 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.