Writer: Bryan Johnson
Artist: Walter Flanagan
Publisher: IDW
Price: $3.99
Release Date: January
You know, I can hear the pitch for this comic as if I was there. Let’s take all the things that guys like in a horror story; Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves and Nazis, put them into the blender and see what comes out. Look at Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, it’s got most of those and Cthulhu-type god monsters thrown in too - and it’s great. The PC game Return to Castle Wolfenstein was very popular and based on a similar idea.
The difference between those examples and this is entirely in the execution. Mignola uses the clichés as a source of humour and subverts expectations by having the supposed Apocalypse Beast turn out to be a hero. Castle Wolfenstein is an immersive, addictive and damned scary game – who cares if the story is a bit rubbish? Sadly, War of the Undead doesn’t have that luxury and is found wanting on a number of levels. The premise is hardly original, presenting the reader with a panoply of villainous Nazis bent on winning the war at any cost and prepared to call on supernatural forces in order to achieve this.
However, that in itself is not a grave sin if the premise is constructed in a funny, scary or, at least in some manner, entertaining way. All, that is, every single one, of the characters introduced in this first issue are evil. Whether maniacal or simply bad hardly makes a difference as there is no-one to invest any emotion on. The closest that the writers offer us is a whinging Nazi Youth who is dispatched to Hitler’s bunker (after the suicides) to retrieve something vital for the continuation of the war. Having gathered Hitler’s testicles in a brown paper bag, the Nazi youth is sent off to deliver them to a Nazi scientist/necromancer. The necromancer is a cackling caricature of evil, accompanied by a weathered looking zombie in a Nazi uniform. Naturally the necromancer feels obliged to bully the youth into accompanying him on a journey while he provides an explanation of ‘what’s going on’.
When they reach their destination, we get what one might call the ‘money shot’ as the aircraft lands in a field full of soldiers and undead fighting one another. In a glorious technicolor spread we get to see what the artist imagines an aircraft’s engines might do to a mass of fragile human bodies. Once the entire back-story is told the young Nazi is no longer required and is dispatched by a gasmask-wearing henchman.
The utter pointlessness of this main character’s fate and actions underlines the puerile and thoughtless nature of the book. It offers nothing that a serious writer would regard as a story; the plot is a series of events that dispense with any attempt at logic, even if that logic were internal to the story world. There are no characters, merely caricatures and the entire purpose of the book seems to be designed to allow the artist to draw body parts flying though the air.
Frankly, if you want to see violence of this nature, watch the news. It’s less depressing and might actually have some value. On the upside, if this book has managed to get published, there is hope for anyone.
John Davidson Despite working in IT for the last 20 years and collecting comics for even longer, he is married, has two young daughters and lives in Scotland. Ideally he spends his spare time reading and watching movies, but this is curtailed by the calls of child-rearing and part-time study, not to mention the 'call of the internet'.