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Mammoth Book Of Zombie Comics
Review by John Reppion
Title: The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics
Editor: David Kendall
Publisher: Robinson (www.constablerobinson.com)
Specifications: Paperback, 460 pages
A quick glance at www.constablerobinson.com
will tell you that they are the publishers responsible for The Mammoth
Book of… well, just about everything really: The Beatles, Erotic
Confessions, Best Short SF Stories, Manga, True Hauntings, this list is
seemingly endless. And thanks to Editor David Kendall (who also put together
Robinson’s Mammoth Book of Best War Comics) there are now zombies
amongst their ranks. The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics
features eighteen black and white stories from the 80s, 90s and 2000s
from the likes of Steve Niles, Vincent Locke, Laura Watton and Scott Hampton,
as well as a host of less well known but equally talented folk. Unusually
for an anthology title, there seems to be no upper limit for the page
count of any individual story meaning that whole issues, and even graphic
novels worth of material have been reprinted.
The lure of reading Vince Locke’s first ever Deadworld
story, Black Sabbath, will doubtless be enough to pull
many readers in though personally I was most pleasantly surprised by stories
like The Corpse and The Haunted Ship,
adapted by Russian writer/artist Askold Akishin, and Zombie World:
Dead End, a two issue Dark Horse mini reprinted in its entirety.
I was similarly impressed to find several stories from the 2007 Accent
UK anthology (titled, you guessed it, Zombies) included
in the book.
Also featured in TMBOZC is Scott Hampton’s legendary
60 page adaptation of the Robert E. Howard story Pigeons from
Hell, but sadly there’s a catch. Although the art is reproduced
in full the story is completely devoid of text, presumably owing to Robert
E. Howard’s estate having some issue with his words being reprinted.
Though Hampton’s artwork is truly beautiful, the absence of any
text makes the inclusion of Pigeons from Hell seem rather
futile. Similarly the inclusion of Shepherd and Bony’s Dead
Eyes Open, which is a perfectly decent looking and adequately
written tale but which takes up almost one third of the volume’s
total page count, had me scratching my head a little. Given that neither
Shepherd nor Bony are huge names and that neither they nor their story
is mentioned on the book’s cover, I can’t help thinking that
some readers might not be all that thrilled to discover that such a huge
chunk of the volume is taken up by their work, enjoyable though it may
be.
Anthologies are always something of a balancing act and unfortunately
the problems mentioned above rather tipped the scales in the wrong direction
for me. Undeniably there are some thoroughly enjoyable, well written and
wonderfully drawn stories in TMBOZC but those picking
up the book in order to check out Scott Hampton’s Pigeons
from Hell (and I’m sure there will be quite a few given
that the cover price of TMBOZC is significantly lower
than that of a second hand copy of PFH) will almost certainly
be left dissatisfied.