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Well it’s currently October so now’s a good of time as any to write a review about various horror comics/books. I got a lot about zombies. A LOT. 

However, we’ll be completely ignoring The Walking Dead, since everyone knows about that one, what we will be doing is focusing on the “Walking Dead” of the late 80s to mid 90s which was called Deadworld.

Just like a metal album cover.

This is going to probably be in multiple parts so consider this all the background info shit.

Deadworld’s initial premise is pretty simple like most zombie shit. The dead have risen and are trying to eat humans. Humans are trying to survive, some of them are worse than the zombies, etc. You know, the usual.

However as the story goes on, there’s a bit more that gets uncovered with what’s going on as far as what’s causing this zombie outbreak. And no, it’s not a virus, or a chemical or aliens, or left unexplained. They actually go the less traveled magic route with it. Really the only major series I can think of that uses magic to explain the dead rising is the Evil Dead series. I’m sure there was some inspiration from it, along from the usual Romero movies.

Anyway someone was trying to summon demons for power or open a portal or some shit and they fucked everything up. Now the dead have risen. 

They’re the classic Romero style zombies that movie slow, but there’s a few intelligent zombies. And not just intelligent like they remember how to do a few mundane tasks, they’re smart like the ones from Return of the Living Dead which means they can do anything a regular human can.

Now it’s never quite clear if the intelligent zombies are actual human corpses that just managed to retain their intellect or if they’re otherworldly evil spirits inhabiting the corpses, hence their intelligence. The main reason why it’s never quite clear is sort of due the main antagonist “King Zombie” who seems a bit more attached to his “original” corpse body than the rest. (More on that much later)

Then again, it’s been awhile since I’ve read through this series so maybe they do explain it more and I forgot. Perhaps we’ll all learn together along the way.

Also as the story goes on, it’s not just zombies that are roaming around. There was a portal to another world opened and other things were living there, so eventually demons start popping up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself on a lot of this, even if it is mentioned pretty early on.

I’ll also be going on about some of the other bits about the series not directly related to the story since it’s all a rich tapestry. (No really, the history of all this is really convoluted at times)

Anyway on to the beginning of the tale!

Deadworld (The Beginning)

So it starts off with the usual group of friends that have all apparently banded together and are using a school bus to get around in.

You got Mike who’s supposed to be the self appointed leader.
Chris is some black haired girl Mike’s interested in. (She’s also the bitchy I don’t need no man one)
John is some blond dude who tends to be the “middle of the road” guy. (Also likes Chris)
Joey is John’s annoying 10 year old brother (That most of the readers hated)
Mickey is the black guy who used to sell dope. (Lol)
Dan is the tough guy that used to help Mickey sell dope.
and finally Donna is a blond chick who’s the girlfriend of Dan (And the hawt one) 

The first issue is mainly getting them all established as their character (Like Dan being a big asshole that’s one of the better fighters, Mike being a bossy idealist asshole that wants to rebuild civilization, etc) 

It’s also during this very first issue that the ongoing antagonist King Zombie pops up. He’s with two other intelligent zombies and funny enough, he doesn’t even seem to be the main one in charge. There’s a zombie with a mohawk that seems to be giving a lot of orders as they set up the attack. It hardly matters since the other two get killed leaving him as the sole intelligent zombie for awhile. As with most villains, he’s not fond of losing a battle, so he starts following the group to get revenge.

Interestingly while the word “zombie” is used in various issues, they’re often called “geeks” by a lot of people. I assume this might be a reference to carnival geek that would eat anything. (Meanwhile KZ calls the humans “warmies”)

The next issue is mainly a “buddy episode” which is mainly Dan and Mike having to work together to find more gas and in the process get their differences out of the way. By the third issue the group has decided that the best place to defend themselves from zombies is to go aboard this old river boat they stumble upon.

Also at this time you get a scene of some bearded ragged man running around talking crazy to himself. This is Deake and you find out a little later he’s the apprentice of the warlock/necromancer who caused all this shit to happen. He runs into some large demonic figure that has “666” on his forehead because it wasn’t obvious enough that he was a fucking demon. The demons mocks him and even kills him, but it turns out crazy old Deake was having some fucked up vision and is still alive. (The demon also mentions he’s going to pay for his mistake like Fiderman is paying for his. This name is important much later)

Meanwhile King Zombie has caught up with the group and water isn’t going to stop him from organizing a horde from invading the boat, and that’s exactly what happens. He also catches Dan off guard and punches him off the boat.

Fourth issue is dealing mostly with the riverboat attack and it’s right here in this issue that the writers are giving zero fucks about killing off characters. Now it is a zombie scenario so some people are going to die obviously, so killing off Mickey was a safe bet (Black guy dies first) but also Chris gets ripped apart by zombies thus eliminating any sort of potential love triangle shit or anything else that seemed like it was starting with her.

Granted I didn’t give a shit about either character, though I was just wishing Joey got killed instead. (As was everyone) Meanwhile Dan got punched off the boat and into the water, you don’t see what happened to him so it’s assumed he died, but since you never saw a body…come on…we all know he’s still alive since he’s like the only cool character in the group.

Either way, four issues in and they already cut the group in half.

It’s about this point that we’ll get into some of the shit outside the comic’s story and into the real world before continuing with the story proper (Because as I said, it’s all a rich tapestry)

Deadworld Letters Pages

Now there were more than few readers that were pissed about Chris getting killed (and Mickey and Dan) and were writing angry letters about it. In fact there were angry letters about anything that were published in the comic right along side the positive ones.

The readers’ letters in Deadworld were a great example of pre-Internet forum shitposting. Seriously. While I’m getting ahead of myself again, it really got to the point where the  letters pages got more entertaining than the comic at times. 

King Zombie would answer the letters usually insulting readers that bitched about the comic. Hell, he even insulted readers who praised the comic.

(This seems oddly familiar, but I’m not sure what…)

Now would also be a good time to mention the covers.

Deadworld Covers

I’ll be mentioning more about that lady next post

Deadworld started having two different covers by issue 6. The reasons for this are a little unclear. The publisher, Arrow Comics, was an indy comic so it wasn’t like they had DC/Marvel money to throw around to do this sort of spending. 

This was also still the late 80s, a little before the multiple cover craze of the mid/late 90s. 

If I had to guess, it wasn’t necessarily a “collectors tactic” but trying to appeal to a broader audience due to the covers generally being considered gory. Honestly other than the two that I posted though, the other three of the first five comic covers weren’t that gory. (Yes, of course I was going to post the good shit)

But they didn’t want to lose their gore enthusiast fanbase so they made two covers. One which was “tame” and the other which said “Not for Wussies” on the front. (There’s a slang word you never hear anymore!)

Told you it was a lady!

Now of course this was the 80s so you could get away with showing ugly demonic monster tits on the cover of a comic along with bloody entrails, or at least in my comic shops you could. There might have been more restrictive faggot shops that censored shit like that with a piece of cardboard in a plastic bag. 

Unsurprisingly, I always bought the graphic cover whenever possible. However, being a pragmatist I occasionally got the lame cover if it was the only one available since I was more interested in the story and I was comfortable enough with who I was that I didn’t need to NOT buy the comic just because there weren’t ugly demonic monster tits on the cover.

This trend with the alternate covers went on for awhile, but more on that later. Back to the story.

Deadworld (The End of Arrow)

Okay issue five, half the group is dead and now everyone’s sad. Donna’s sad that Dan’s gone. Mike AND John are sad that Chris is gone. Nobody gives a shit about the black dude being dead and Joey’s annoying as usual

It’s about this time they run into Deake in the woods and being a half crazed coward, he’s babbling about how he and his master were the ones who caused the zombies to rise and goes on about this. He also insists on traveling with them since he’s the only one that can close the gate.

Meanwhile the gate is technically closed already since there aren’t hordes of demons running completely amok in the world, but it isn’t properly locked. It cuts to one of those ladies on the covers I just posted. In fact quite a few of them enter from a portal and go immediately looking for shit to kill. You get several scenes of random violence of them just wrecking the shit out of groups of humans with very little effort. They’re called Grakens officially, but later KZ names them like “Fido” or “Rover” since he considers them to be like loyal dogs that obey his commands. 

Later on the group encounters a small community living in the boonies that’s relatively safe. John gets over Chris by making out with one of the smalltown girls. His brother Joey even gets a “girlfriend” when some girl his age says she likes him. Donna’s still being mopey due to Dan being gone and Mike manages to continue to be a shitty leader by alienating some of the small town folk with his insistence that he wants to fine “real civilization” and is trying to recruit people into his crew.

Deake gets scolded by some bible thumper, and KZ tracks the group again to the small town where he commands Fido to rip a baby in half for information of where they are exactly.

Issue six and things get worse for the group when KZ captures them all and the family they’re staying with. KZ’s not pleased with them making him look bad to his boss (Who you might assume is the large demon guy with 666 on his head) but he wants to have a little fun with them for being such a pain in the ass. So he starts chopping off Mike’s fingers until he passes out. 

Then he discovers Deake who mentions he can open the gate again, so KZ accepts sparing him and decides to cut the fun short. He’s about to stab Donna, when Dan arrives with a shotgun and generally looking like a badass. He actually kills one of the Grakens with a blast to it’s head and blows off another one’s arm. KZ makes a retreat, but he takes Deake with him. (And Donna’s all happy because Dan’s alive)

It’s also about this time that one of the two dudes in charge of the company left to do his own thing. I’m sure this won’t impact the comic at all…

Anyway next issue and Dan’s sort of taken lead of the group, especially since Mike’s always been a terrible leader that nobody likes and he’s a cripple now with missing fingers (He’s no Rick Grimes that’s for sure) Dan even punches Mike when he’s bitching about everything. Dan’s plan is to find KZ and kill him once and for all.

They leave the small community behind, though it goes back to the girl that John had something going with and she thinks John has come back to stay since you see a figure walking to her house, but John’s still with the group. 

Meanwhile KZ is enduring Deake’s fumbling with the gate opening spell. He’d rather not have to, but someone living has to open the gate unfortunately. When Dan and the group locate KZ, Dan’s plan extends to killing Deake so he can’t open the gate. Mike is against this, but Dan points out that it would be easier to take him out than trying to rescue him.

The attack plan all goes to shit when the assassination shot to Deake’s head misses, though it still is enough to interrupt his spell. A fight breaks out, Dan kills another Graken, but it starts looking grim due to being outnumbered, but then some paramilitary guys in helicopter show up and blast zombies. KZ has to retreat from being out gunned and loses Deake who runs off.

The para military leader says they’re here to help and take everyone aboard the helicopter. (Lol)

Issue 8 and to no surprise the para military guys are asshole taking them to be entertainment for the zombie pits. Dan is the only one overhears the bitching by the soldiers about having to do work at all and tries to pull his gun, but it’s knocked out of his hand and the group is fucked.

The group goes to some holding area and it’s there where the farm girl that liked John (and her little sister that liked Joey) are at. 

KZ, is having an internal dialog moment kicking himself that he played around with the group too long and should have just killed them immediately. He’s at least self aware of his mistakes. He’s also pissed about losing Deake so he’s sent Grakens to go hunt him down and bring him back.

The main focus of this issue is on some new characters. The main ones being Sergeant Bowker who was the leader of mission and his boss Moloch who is basically “The Governor” of this town, though not nearly as emotional and crazy. Moloch also has a girlfriend who just seems like some sort of mouthy trophy wife that asks why does he do terrible shit like having zombie arena games, to which he basically says “Because I enjoy it.”

Bowker reports all the crazy shit they saw on the mission like the Grakens and the stuff about Deake, portals, intelligent zombies, etc. Moloch believes him and wants to go with him personally on the next mission.

Oh and there’s two guys called Punk and Eddie who end up becoming “Those two guys” as the comic goes on. 

Okay ninth issue and farm girl explains that the para-military guys captured her and her sister, along with the rest of the community and brought them to this place. They’ve been here quite awhile since the original group was spending all that time hunting KZ and Deake when the para-military guys found the small community.

There’s also some nut called Percy that latches on to the group while in the holding area. He’s mostly annoying. The group makes plans to figure out how to escape.

Meanwhile Bowker recruits Punk and Eddie since they’re short a few men. Eddie doesn’t want to cut his hair off, but Punk convinces him them won’t have to and they show up wearing latex bald coverings on their heads. Now where the hell they even got such a thing in post apocalyptic zombie town is a mystery, but I guess there was still an abandoned Halloween shop or something around

You also get introduced to what is assumed to be some gladiator champion of the zombie arena who goes by the name Wolverine. He even uses a fucking three prong claw type weapon, along with a spiked bat. Unoriginal names aside, what makes him stand out is he’s got a shaved head and fucking swastika in the middle of his forehead like Charles Manson and people are cheering him on as he kills zombies.

Hey it was the 80s when you could have shit like that and not get canceled.

So Mike gets separated from the group to be interrogated by Bowker and Moloch who are riding around on the helicopter based on the info they learned. Eddie and Punk are with them (And not fooling anyone with their latex bald caps)

KZ is still looking for Deake without much success and the helicopter ends up in his area and soldiers start opening fire on the zombie hordes below.

Having enough of their shit and being pissed about not finding Deake, KZ opens fire back and kills one of them. This freaks out Punk and Eddie, but Moloch keeps cool saying that’s the one they want unharmed. (Which is a dumber plan than when KZ was playing around with the OG group rather than killing them immediately)

And we’ll stop here for now. Yes, it’s a bit of a cliff hanger, but there is a reason. Mainly because the next issue is the beginning of the new publisher that took over the series which I’ll explain right here. 

Caliber comics, which was another indy comic company ended up buying up all the rights to the various series that Arrow owned. Deadworld probably being one of the major ones. 

They did not buy the company, just the products, because Arrow comics actually came back again later (But that’s a tale for another time).

In any case, the artwork became less consistent since I guess they were trying to figure out what artist to put on the issue. So sometimes the style really didn’t match the comic all that well. 

It’s also about here that the comic started getting a bit more involved in terms of the storyline. Caliber didn’t just leave the series to rot, they actually did put effort into it and it sort of worked…for awhile anyway.

Next update will begin the Caliber reign.

No, I take that back. A side plot about dudes wearing latex caps because they don't want to cut their hair in the zombie apocalypse is weirder than anything involving killing or not killing Deake.

And I see you found one of the many, many odd spin offs/one shots/side tales of Deadworld.

I was going to eventually get into those in more detail later, but I'll just briefly mention Tattoo since it's posted.

Tattoo is one of the later self contained mini-stories. Didn't come out until the mid 90s as I remember which was around the time that there was this sudden upsurge in the nearly naked "Bad Girl" protagonists in comics. Granted they were always around in some form, but they were every fucking where during the 90s since everyone was doing the EXTREME edgelord thing. Even DC and Marvel.

I actually haven't seen the cover you posted before, but apparently that's from one of those graphic novel collections where they just put the whole series in one book. I don't think Tattoo was that widely published. In fact I only came across it when I first went to one of those comic cons and the original Arrow publishers had copies of it. As I said, the Arrow guys (Ralph and Stu) pop up again to add to the Deadworld stuff.

As for Tattoo herself, well I'll explain more about her when we get to that bit. (Might be awhile though)

With Mike not wanting to kill Deake, well Mike's trying to re-establish civilization so he leans more towards the mindset that  killing another human is wrong. But he goes along with Dan's plan pretty quickly since Dan explains the reason and Dan just punched him several panels ago.

And Punk and Eddie are supposed to be the comic relief duo of sorts. Or at least they're sort of introduced as such. They sort of get away with doing silly shit which would probably get them killed in an otherwise grimdark setting.

>killing another human is wrong

Bruh, just call it an execution as JUSTICE for helping make the world that way and for now actively helping to make it worse, and it's one on the most civilized acts anyone can do.

In fact if you have the chops to both order and carry out an execution, you can declare yourself king on the spot I'm pretty sure. King Human, that's right.

Deadworld (New Caliber)

Okay so with issue 10, Caliber gives a quick wrap up of the storyline in text form on the inside cover. It’s also established that KZ is still answering the readers’ letters (and insulting them)

Story starts off with militia guys throwing Mike out the helicopter with a rope tied to his leg as a form of torture to get more information. He comes close to not only smashing into the ground, but also get ripped apart by the zombie horde on the ground. Punk and Eddie pull him back up and Bowker kicks him in the belly.

Despite the fact he’s told them everything Moloch says to keep dropping him in this poor man’s bungie fashion until he coughs up more info (as opposed to just vomit)

KZ’s in the area, but he’s too busy looking for Deake to shoot at the militia boys again. You also get another quick scene of Wolverine slaughtering zombies in the arena.

Meanwhile Dan and John are looking for a way out and they find some sort of vent. Joey’s stuck with Donna, John’s farm girl and her little sister. The little sister complains about being cold and hungry and she falls asleep.

As a group (and dumb ass Percy) they head to the air vent. John offers to carry his gfarm girl’s little sister and then she opens her eyes again and CHOMP

John gets half his neck bitten off and now there’s a little zombie girl running about. Cuts back to Mike’s torture. Punk and Eddie are dropping him again, but unfortunately the knot gets loose and Mike goes crashing into the ground head first where upon the zombies eat his remains.

Well Caliber starts their reign with a bang by killing two more of the original crew.

And this is about the time you start getting spin offs and side stories. This one appears in the same book though.

The side story starts with some talking female corpse that calls herself Amy killing some guy and then looking for a new body since hers is all rotted and gross. Amy picks what apparently was the guy’s girlfriend who was killed early with one blow to the heart. She’s more or less intact and the wound is easy to hide so Amy stabs herself in the brain and her ghostly evil spirit enters the new human corpse.

This is probably the first time that they show why some of the zombies are intelligent. Namely like I said, they’re evil spirits that possess bodies.

Amy then hears a group of human survivors approaching so she pretends she just killed a zombie (Her old body) and ends up joining up with them.

On to 11, so Moloch is bitching at Punk and Eddie for fucking up though it was his dumb idea to keep dropping Mike when it was obvious he didn’t know shit else. But then a good dictator never admits his mistakes and blames his minions.

KZ’s lost Deake’s trail at this point so he decides to just fuck with the militia boys since he’s wanting to take his frustration out on something. He starts shooting and killing several of them in the helicopter.

Keep in mind how good of a shot KZ is given that he’s just using like some revolver and landing kill shots every time. Granted the helicopter at this point isn’t that high in the air, but as Bowker orders “Don’t just stand there catching bullets, strafe the bastard!”

So they land because Moloch really wants to capture KZ. (Lol, what a fucktard) and there’s one last shot of Mike or what’s left of him after the zombie horde ate his body.

KZ meanwhile is having one of his legless grakens hide itself under leaves for a stealthy ambush.

Back with what little remains of the OG group, John’s a corpse and his farm’s girl’s little sister chowing on him, Joey loses his shit and bashes her brains into the concrete for killing his brother. Dan drags him back from his rage and says they got to get back to escaping. Oddly the farm girl has nothing to say about all this. No tears for John or her zombified sister. She’s just sort of standing around doing nothing.

I think this probably establishes for certain that getting bit by the zombies does not in fact also turn you into one of them. You don’t even necessarily come back to life since they just leave John’s corpse there and he doesn’t come back.

Dan and the group stumble about until they get to a few men playing cards. They fail their sneak skill and get caught.

And thus ends the main story this issue and goes to the side one with Amy.

So Amy’s telling the survivor group some bullshit story about how she got lost out here and such. They believe her and one of them explains their own little story and you think that perhaps Amy’s going to play some sort of long game of hiding among them, picking them off one by one.

Nope, she ends up getting close to one acting like she’s into him and rips his fucking heart out right in front of the others with a big grin on her face. It’s like when you’re trolling a forum and you just can’t keep up facade any longer.

So she’s choking another guy out and one of the women of the group smashes her in the back of the head with some burning wood, but she just laughs about how they’re too weak to kill her and fire isn’t going to do shit.

Then she grabs the girl and says “I can kill you with a kiss, but that doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian.”

Like she’s draining her life essence, but it was REALLY important for the remaining humans to know that she was not into the rug munching.

Gotta love it. Though it brings up the question of if she’s got life draining mouth powers why the hell doesn’t she use those to transfer to “intact” bodies. Then again Amy seems to be really into ol’ ultra violence and prefers to make a mess most of the time.

Anyway on to 12.

Dan and crew are pretty much fucked and when he tries to fight back, John’s farm girl just gets her brains blown out. No loss there, considering she was never important and had even less importance with John dead.

They separate Dan from the rest since they got plans for him.

Meanwhile Moloch and the rest are still stumbling in the woods looking for KZ and generally getting their asses handed to them due to zombie and graken attacks. In one cool scene the crippled graken hiding in the leaves sits up to crotch chomp one of the soldiers. The other soldiers don’t shoot the kraken since they figure Moloch will want to see it, so they shoot their crotchless buddy instead.

Then KZ shows up and kills the rest and keeps one to interrogate.

Moloch is bitching at Bowker because everything’s going to shit, but some of their reinforcements found Deake and they take him as a prisoner.

Cuts back to Dan getting thrown in the arena with Wolverine where upon he gets his ass handed to him.

Back to the Amy side story… (Yeah when they had these back up stories the main story was sometimes really short)

At this point her story is just her killing the rest of the survivors while her body is still on fire. By the end of it, there’s only one girl left from that group and due to Amy’s lack of attack strategy she has to go chase her down because the brand new body she just acquired is now in worse condition than the one she started the story off with.

But then when you’re an overpowered entity who needs such complex strategies I guess.

On to 13.

In this one we finally learn what Moloch’s girl’s name is which is Reyna. She’s obviously a bored housewife and decides to save Dan from death in the arena by claiming he’s needed for questioning.

Since nobody wants to piss off the main man’s bitch, they force Wolverine to let him go (Who just says he’ll get him next time)

Now we also see some more intelligent zombies because suddenly KZ has reinforcements of his own and he’s gathered some like himself. They’ve done some scouting of their own and tracked Moloch’s fortress city since KZ’s decided that having a large group of organized humans needs to be taken care of and now HE wants Moloch left alive presumably to kill him himself.

KZ still has the one soldier from the city that he’s got for interrogation, but one of the intelligent zombies (Who later gets known as the Vamp) says she can get more info out of him her way.

The Vamp’s way is of course sucking his dick until he tells her everything. This works of course and then you hear a scream since she’s of course bit his dick off (Probably his balls too) after she was done. Right after she had just told him that a little necrophilia never hurt anyone.

I’ll go ahead and mention that the “Vamp” is about the only other smart zombie of any note in the group of them. It of course helps that she’s drawn like some sex vixen and only has a slit throat as any sort of obvious wound. Also, she’s aggressively sexual towards humans.

Moloch and the rest come back and Renya explains why Dan is resting in their apartment since he was about to be killed and he was part of the OG group they were questioning. (Dan finds out about Mike’s death at this point) and he might have more important info.

Moloch and Bowker go plan for a potential attack while Renya ends up fucking Dan who is trying to still get his strength back. (And of course if video games have taught us anything, fucking a whore will do that)

Meanwhile Joey, Donna and Percy got thrown back in the holding area. Joey claims he’ll protect Donna to which she’s like “You’re just a boy.” and of course he’s claiming to be a man. Percy who in one of the rare moments of being useful points out that nobody actually knew about the vent they used, so why don’t they just use it again and go a different way?

Joey says that idea’s retarded, but Donna in further destruction of the boy’s ego, says it’s a good idea, so that’s what they do.

KZ and his group are now planning for the all out assault on the city with some of the usual problems of herding the dumb zombies properly and one of the artillery cannons they brought exploding on them.

Moloch is now acting like a bitch and already making escape plans with Bowker since there really are an awful lot of zombies heading towards the city. He gives orders to let all the prisoners out of the holding area so the zombies can eat them first. They’ll escape with Renya and some others.

Reyna on the other hand is too busy fucking Dan again, but he’s back up to full health so he punches her out and grabs clothes and a gun so he can go save Joey and Donna (Y’know his actual girlfriend)

Donna and Percy go through the vent, but Joey get separated due to the holding area doors getting opened to let everyone out. Zombies are pouring in and the shit is hitting fan just as Joey finally manages to get that gun he’s wanted since the first issue.

Back to the last bit of the Amy story. Basically Amy catches up with the girl who blows herself up spectacularly with a hand grenade leaving no body and Amy’s current body is fucked too since all that remains is a skull and she’ll be stuck until someone wanders by. Lol.

And finally we’ll end this post with a review of issue 14 since five issues per post are probably a good stopping point.

Issue 14 starts off with Punk and Eddie going on about how lucky they were to have not gotten into more trouble for letting Mike die and getting a cushy job guarding Deake instead.

Then a horde of zombies show up on floor they’re on from the elevator.

Dan’s making his way down from Moloch’s apartment, Joey finally feel like a man now that he’s blasting zombies with an uzi. Donna and Percy are sneaking their way past zombies feasting on dead humans.

You figure maybe they’ll all join up, but only Dan and Joey run into each other and eventually after some running and gunning Dan says fuck it and decides they’ll never find Donna and figures that he and Joey should just escape.

Meanwhile Renya’s come to Moloch and Bowker’s location with the transport helicopter. They got Deake in tow while Moloch is getting pissy with Renya about who is really in charge since she’s making a lot of decisions independently.

While they’re doing this lover’s quarrel bullshit, KZ’s showed up with one of those cannons and fires on the helicopter, effectively destroying that escape plan. Moloch gets hurt by falling debris and despite him being an asshole to her, Reyna tells some soldiers to help get him into a nearby army truck and escape that way.

As they’re leaving Bowker is shouting obscenities since he’s also trapped under some rubble and they’ve just left him behind. He’s suddenly helped out though by a familiar face and then he realizes its one of the soldiers that went missing during the mission in the woods.

The Vamp has him on a chain and asks Bowker how he feels about necrophillia. (She’s got a one track mind)

Another intelligent zombie reports to KZ that all human resistance has been destroyed and the city is theirs.

“Now what do we do with it?”

Like I said, good stopping point for this one.

The original main characters don't seem very interesting compared to the villains, and I guess the writers felt the same. But I feel like the only reason this storyline has any coherence at all is the fact that you're the one describing it.

Meanwhile I'm pretty amazed that even an indie comics company in the 80s could fail to get sued by Marvel over Wolverine.

Caliber (and especially Arrow) comics was probably small enough that it went under the radar. Marvel was big, but it also didn't have the all encompassing eye of Disney yet to spot every possible infringement. Probably were too busy battling it out with DC as usual.

Plus Wolverine was never in the comic that much. Probably the name is why they never used him much since they didn't want to press their luck. Like he'll pop up again later, but he's still never that important despite a few readers wanting to see more of him.

Dead Letters (Quick Interlude)

So we’ll have a brief interlude about the letters page since issue 14 had a shitload of them with KZ just insulting a shitload of readers. One in particular sticks out.

Some reader called Aaron from Ohio wrote in a bunch of times asking that how the OG group should get a dog and have Wolverine join the team. He also likes how the comic doesn’t deal too much with Satan which caused him to quit another comic. KZ told him to get a life since he’s writing them too much and how he must have a fetish for animals if he wants a dog and a wolverine in the group.

Apparently Aaron was some dedicated Christian who was fine with all the graphic violence, nudity, necrophillia and rape, but having Satan himself in the comic would have been a bridge too far.

(Aaron will come up again in the future)

Besides calling other readers desperate losers (For remarking on how the grakens’ tits are getting bigger for example) he actually calls one reader a faggot vegetable.

What a glorious era that you could go around calling your readers faggot vegetables and it’s that sort of Golden Age that I try to make sure always exists here. You're welcome.

The Discord peeps reading this thread but too lazy to post in it are indeed faggot vegetables, I should make that a role.

Deadworld (Slow Descent)

Now at this point in the comic everything has been more or less good. Or at least I’ve thought so. There’s been some retarded moments, but you can’t usually have everything. While they have killed off most of the OG group, to be honest, the only one that I ever really liked was Dan anyway and he wasn’t even my favorite character. In fact, I really didn’t give a shit about most of the human characters other than them being used to drive the story. 

As you might have easily guessed, my favorite character was King Zombie and besides the obvious reasons, he’s technically the most consistent character that seems to have somewhat of a goal. Even the OG group were more drifting about and arguing about what they SHOULD be doing. 

The introduction of the militia folks was an okay way of bringing in new characters while killing off some more old ones. I feel like when Caliber got a hold of the book, they wanted to go a different direction than what might have been originally envisioned hence why they killed off Mike and John and semi-upgraded Renya to be more than just Moloch’s bitch. Moloch himself was way less impressive than what was probably planned for him. He was sort of set up as like a Governor/Negan type antagonist at first, but he never is really all that threatening.

So like I said, everything’s been fine with the comic so far. Well that’s about to change a little. There’s still a few more issues to go before it starts getting convoluted, but the cracks will be starting in this next batch.

Let’s go, issue 15.

So this one starts off with some suburban dream of Donna and Dan living some tranquil life until Dan starts ranting and ripping their baby apart as he turns into a zombie. Donna wakes up just as she’s about to be eaten. Percy’s the only one traveling with her and she’s wondering what the fuck she’s going to do being lost in the woods and all.

They hear motorcycles and immediately Donna thinks they should run since KZ rides around on a motorcycle. 

Cuts to Joey and Dan who are also somewhere in the woods and they get surrounded by zombies, but oddly the zombies completely ignore them (Even after shooting a few). They’re all being drawn to somewhere else. Dan and Joey follow them because…well they don’t have anything intelligent to do. 

KZ and the Vamp back at the city start noticing that the zombies are wandering off as well and they aren’t following KZ’s commands. He gets pissed about this so he decides to investigate where the hell they’re all going. (See, now KZ at least has a good reason to see where all his soldiers are wandering off to)

The Vamp has her own plans. She’s recruited Bowker to help find Deake since he was still prisoner with Moloch’s remaining forces when they escaped. Bowker is partly helping since he wants revenge on Moloch for leaving him behind. (And out of survival) 

And Punk and Eddie have once again managed to survive the zombie city slaughter and hide in the back of the army truck that Bowker and the Vamp are driving. Punk is under the delusion that Bowker likes them enough that he’ll help them out. 

So Dan and Joey get to where all the zombies went to and it turns out they are all summoned by this fat voodoo lady (black of course). She got some assistants that tell Joey and Dan to be quiet and not interrupt shit because she’s trying to contain the zombies by getting one in particular.

And that of course is KZ who just happens to show up. She figures if she can control him, it’ll be easier to contain the problem since he can control the rest. Dan on the other hand wants to just kill him, but her assistants take his guns away. Dan attempts to provoke KZ by mentioning Deake, but KZ doesn’t do anything but stand there. Dan then wonders if he really is under control.

In a bizarre turn of events, Dan starts singing “Jeepers Creepers” in reference to the fact that he can’t see KZ’s eyes, just only ever his sun glasses. He gets close enough to take them off which then reveals KZ just has hollowed out eyeless worm sockets. 

So since KZ is with Dan and the voodoo bunch, he’s obviously not the one driving the motorcycle in the area with Donna. That turns out to be a motor cycle gang which is much to the relief of Donna. 

They say they’re both welcome to come back to camp, but they’ll have to pull their weight. Donna mentions how she can cook and clean and while Percy is retarded he can do stuff too.

But of course chores isn’t exactly what the bikers have in mind.

Well I wish I could tell you Donna fought the good fight, but well she’s a pretty girl and had no chance in hell against a bunch of biker dudes. Even calling for Percy didn’t help. (Not that he could have done anything)

Rape ensues. Like really graphic rape ensues since it shows her get stripped naked and gang raped. The leader is actually on top of her saying how she’s so good he’ll make her his bitch while she’s looking away screaming. Yep, out of all the shit that’s happened in the comic that’s probably the darkest bit in the series at that point. (Even a graken killing the baby back in issue five was sort of expected since it had been showing the things ripping everything apart when they arrived)

Percy being the retard he is, asks “Y’all ain’t gonna hurt her are ya?”

To which one of the bikers says, no they aren’t hurting her and tell him to take a walk. Percy wanders away and says to let him know when she’s done. That same biker says okay and then Percy grabs some zombie head off the ground and punts it as he looks at the sunrise.

Moving on to 16

Goes back to Dan yelling at Joey to shoot KZ (since voodoo people never searched Joey) and once again getting a big thrill out of an opportunity to use a gun, he starts firing.

And somehow fucking shoots everything BUT KZ.

Unfortunately he doesn’t get another chance because the voodoo people manage to take his gun away and are now escorting Joey and Dan out before they fuck up the ritual. Dan takes this opportunity to slap Joey in the back of the head for missing KZ.

Voodoo lady now orders KZ to go to the other side of the river and destroy the camp over there. No indication of what or who is at this other camp, but I guess they’re enemies. So apparently the voodoo folks have their own agenda for all this rather than saying “Command all the zombies to bash their own heads in.” 

KZ starts to command them, but then says he forgot something, when questioned what that is, he answers to rip her throat out and then he kills the voodoo lady. KZ stops trolling and then calls upon the zombies to start killing everyone in sight and a few grakens to help.

Cut back to the Vamp and Bowker who have located where Moloch and Renya are hiding out. The Vamp likes Renya (who is fucking some other soldier now) since her body looks nice and fresh. Bowker just wants to know when they’re going in so he can get revenge on Moloch. 

The Vamp says they can after they deal with the two visitors in the back of the truck that she’s known about for awhile now. Bowker (who didn’t know) recognizes Punk and Eddie and they ask if they can make some sort of deal like he made to which the Vamp says they need to be talking to her about any deals.

Cut to Donna and Percy getting back to the biker encampment (It isn’t specified if maybe this was the camp that voodoo lady wanted destroyed, but given how its all in the general area, it could be)

The biker leader’s old lady sees Donna and pitches a fit. Biker leader’s like “Hey take it up with her.”

So that’s exactly what happens. Not wanting to lose her position, Biker leader’s old lady starts beating up Donna and slashes the side of her face. Donna has never been the best of fighters, but after getting gang raped and now this attack on her life, she loses it and goes completely savage on the old lady…or ex old lady since Donna half decapitates her with a shovel. 

Meanwhile, Dan and Joey are running through the swamps and woods until eventually they manage to find a bike in good condition. Dan revs it up and they escape. Since this was KZ’s bike, he’s added another thing on his list to be pissed about.

Okay, on to 17 and this is where the story really starts getting disjointed.

Starts off with another dream sequence except now it’s Dan dreaming that he’s on a boat on the river and Joey’s dead carcass is on the other side of the boat. He wakes up and he’s in some cozy bed and he tells Joey to wake up as well. (They're in different beds! I should clarify that! Lol)

So this entire issue focuses on just Dan and Joey and this seemingly new community they’re in. This community still acts like its before the zombie outbreak complete with kids going to school, cars driving around, going out to eat, parties, etc)

Dan is acting like Joey’s new older brother now and has a job as a mechanic at their garage. Joey’s going to school and it’s just all sort of bizarre since there’s no real build up to any of this, though you do get a flashback in this issue showing bits and pieces of what Dan and Joey were doing between their escape and now. There’s also a lot of nightmares about KZ who is mocking them.

The community itself is odd that they nearly have a “before zombie outbreak” lifestyle to the extent that they do. Then again, it never really does specify how long the zombie shit has been going on, but when the series started I don’t get the impression it had been that long since the OG group. And not that much time has passed since. Maybe a year at most perhaps. It looks like Dan and Joey have been living in the community for awhile though since Joey looks a little older. More of a teenager than a kid now.

In any case this small town doesn’t seem to have much in the way of defenses. You sort of see a fence around the town later, but that's about it. They’re certainly not built up like the city that Moloch was running, but then again they probably didn’t need to be quite as militarized. 

They do seem to realize zombies are a thing, but they don’t really believe all the tales of smart zombies and demons and such.

Anyway, about the only thing of note that happens I guess is Joey gets laid by some other teenage girl he likes. Dan keeps having nightmares about not saving Donna, but he seems to have still moved on to some other girl in town.

Oh and there’s another side tale with Amy again. 

Amy’s in some sort of void floating about and she gets some order to go back to earth to go observe some others of her kind because it seems like they’ve strayed a bit from their original mission. And this is where it sort of implies that these beings start absorbing more of the personality of the body they’re inhabiting and get side tracked (Or too “human” like)

Anyway she goes back to earth and just takes over a zombie. She then targets a couple scrounging for food. The woman of the couple escapes, but she kills the dude and then takes over his body. However, Amy has body dysmorphia and really wants the female body. She tells the other zombies to wait, while she goes to get it.

Yeah, this is a boring issue, however the letters page is a riot!

Besides KZ doing what he does best, Aaron wrote in two more letters. One saying he doesn’t want KZ to wear an upside down cross earring (Which he never fucking does) and more bullshit about not wanting the comic to deal with Satan.

The second letter saying “Thank you” for making him look dumb by insulting him on the last letter that got posted in issue 14. He makes some other statements that he still wants Wolverine to join the survivors. (No Satan, but sure, let’s focus on the Neo-Nazi guy)

Needless to say KZ just insults him all the more. 

Alright issue 18 and this is right before shit gets even more all over the place as far as the storyline.

It starts off with focusing on KZ walking with a couple grakens now that he’s lost his bike. He gets a direct call from the Boss. That big demon thing that was taunting Deake in issue 3, but he’s got a bit more of an artistic upgrade from last time. He’s got bigger horns and an even bigger dick now. (That's how you know he's the Boss after all)

No more 666 on his head though since they didn’t want to offend any religious folks that might be reading. (It was sort of silly he had 666 on his head anyway)

The Boss temporarily opens up the crack to Earth to scold KZ that he’s fucking up on his mission to get the gate opened permanently. He also mentions that KZ has seemingly eaten too much of Fiderman since he’s lost focus.

Which again references that name mentioned in issue 3. KZ’s host body is some dude named Fiderman. I don’t even remember if they ever actually tell you who Fiderman was exactly, but it can only be gathered that he must have been into dark magic and was a biker.

The Boss stresses the importance of gaining control of Earth so he can maintain his power over the other dark lords in whatever chaos nightmare dimension they’re all from.

KZ states that he needs some more decent reinforcements so the Boss agrees to send him more grakens before telling him not to fail him. KZ then realizes he should have asked for another bike too.

It then time skips a bit and shows a couple of bikers driving down the road and drinking, because hey it’s the apocalypse. Then a graken basically clotheslines the pair of them off the bike as they continue to move. One graken helpfully brings KZ a bike.

“Nice, but I wanted the other one!”

The bikers struggle, but they’re no match for the grakens and one gets decapitated immediately despite KZ saying he wanted to talk with them first (Since KZ is a people person)

“I said fucking ALIVE! Why do I even try?”

The other graken manages to follow instructions correctly and KZ speaks to the other biker and even calls him by his name Billy which he’s already surprised about a talking zombie, let alone knowing his name.

Billy then realizes he knows KZ, he says “You’re Fid…” and then the graken kills him.

KZ takes Billy’s bike (The one he wanted)

And just these scenes alone are why KZ was getting to be the only interesting character at this point.

Anyway, cuts back to Dan and Joey and their boring suburban life. Dan’s still have bad dreams about KZ mocking him and now there’s some chaos vortex in the distance that everyone in the town can see. (Probably was when The Boss showed up)

It time jumps a bit with them too. 

Really that’s about it with them.

Then it goes back to the Amy tale. She’s in the husband’s body and slaps around the wife a bit and leaves her to die in a locked room. She didn’t quite kill her though since she wakes up (Pretty damn sloppy considering how thorough Amy tends to be with killing folks)

The woman tries to leave, but Amy stops her and instead of killing her, Amy kills her host body and decides to just take the woman over while she’s still alive. It doesn’t really work though and the woman manages to shoot herself rather than be possessed.

However, the woman was also pregnant, so Amy just takes over the nine month old baby inside, but that doesn’t really work either since now she’s stuck as an ABOMINATION FETUS even if she does manage to crawl out of the mother.

So this dead couple belonged to another group who manage to track down their last location and they find their bodies along with Amy just floating there like an atropol from D&D. They kill the fetus and make some off hand comment about how the mother was going to either name the baby Andrew or Amy.

Meanwhile Amy floats away taking yet another fucking L.

I swear, Amy has no damn concept of long range planning or even an intelligent use of her powers.

This story was mostly without much dialog, mostly a lot of panels of action (mundane or otherwise) I probably posted more words just explaining the story. But then a lot of Amy’s stories are like that.

And that’s it. 

And if this issue seemed short on what was going on, that’s because it sure as hell was. Not even counting the Amy side story which at least is taking place in the same world. There was yet another story shoved in this issue since one thing that indy comics really liked to do was showcase other comics they were publishing in the hopes people would go out and buy those as well. Usually did this in their more popular ones. (Deadworld definitely being one of the flagship comics for the company at the time)

The story was some furry shit. Some naked cat girl, I dunno. Fuck it.

I would have rather they had another letters page with KZ insulting the readers.

As you can also tell I'm starting to do a lot more actual "reviewing" rather than just explaining events. The more something sucks, the more you end up expressing how much it sucks loudly.

Amy is such a hilarious character. I liked when she tried possessing a fetus.

Interesting stuff.

Deadworld (More new shitty characters)

Yeah, you can already tell by my title that I’m getting into the critic review mode.

It’s also about this time that Caliber is explaining constantly in their “Deaditorial” (Which are always sporadically in the cover on various issues) why the hell their comics are late all the goddamn time. Along with going on about how they got some really cool stuff coming up and to stay tuned. Things like KZ’s origins, all new and improved Grakens, and Donna as Queen of the biker sluts.

Given that Donna got gang raped, calling her a slut now is something that could only be joked about in these good old days without getting canceled.

Alright issue 19.

Okay so some dude had a heart attack last issue and actually died of it. Which is remarked about how rare it is for people to die like that nowadays. Dan comes to the conclusion that it’s time to leave this safe space because everyone there is a faggot that is deluding themselves that things are the same as before when they most definitely aren’t.

Joey doesn’t really want to leave since his little girlfriend is there, but Dan’s pretty much his only family now, so he leaves too. (Bros before hoes and all that)

One thing I always wondered is just how self sufficient this town was. They actually had a damn hospital and seemingly a lot of other stuff that really kept up the illusion of “Before Zombies.” I mean I can see a farm or two providing food and some sort of basic electrical system that’s maybe hydro powered, but they also had need for a garage to fix fucking cars. They obviously had enough vehicles to be in need of mechanics constantly (Though they probably were fixing other shit too)

We won’t even get into the whole gas for said cars situation.

Oh well hardly matters since Dan and Joey aren’t even there anymore.

And now we introduce the first of the new shitty characters…

The first one they showcase is Stacey and she’s already fucking insufferable looking. Hilariously she’s got a bandana, glasses, tight jeans and a sleeveless lumberjack shirt. She’s got huge tits though so the shirt is just barely containing them.

A self righteous look of “I’m a survivor and don’t need no man.” as she model poses with an assault rife (twice!) puts it over the top that you want to see this character die.

Anyway, she’s doing some inner monologue about her life along with talking to some old lady seeing the zombies for the first time. It’s all sort of dull. Gets even duller when she starts going on about how the guys started enjoying killing the zombies (Well duh) and this other guy named John (We can use that name again since the first one is dead) seemed different than the rest.

It gets mentioned John had the ideal family life and then his wife got zombified and he had to kill her in front of his kids and a bunch of other shit. John by the way looks like a poor man’s version of Indiana Jones. (Something that gets mocked by readers later)

Anyway, he and Stacy are part of the same survivor group. John’s the leader of this one and his plan is to go further north since he figures the cold weather will mean less zombies and they can rebuild civilization there. He’s doing a better job than Mike ever did at least.

I dunno why I haven’t mentioned this before, but from the beginning of the series, this comic has more or less been taking place in Louisiana and possibly Mississippi  (Hence the voodoo peeps a few issues ago and shit like old timey river boats)

I’m not exactly sure where it’s taking place with these new folks though since I think they’re a little further north, though John’s talking going REALLY north. Like Canada or some shit.

So that’s it for their introduction, NOW to introduce two other new characters!

Cut to Albert and Wayne. Wayne is a biker, Albert is some sweater vest wearing faggot, together they kill zombies!

Well no, not really. Wayne mostly does everything and Albert’s just along for the ride. They’re supposed to be going to Albert’s parent’s house. Fortunately Wayne isn’t quite a stereotypical biker since he’s just sort of helping Albert for free and even giving him some survival training along the way. They are definitely located in Michigan since a lot of cities there get rattled off (Like Detroit) in their conversation.

And other than some conversation and a bit of zombie killing that’s it for Wayne and Albert. And the end of the issue.

It’s a lack luster issue, but hey at least the letter page of this one is packed full of retarded letters and KZ insults. This one stands out since a lot of them are directed towards that Aaron guy with other readers generally calling him a faggot and such. Even the editors said if he was still reading the series after this, then he was a glutton for punishment.

This is also the one that had a letter so completely misspelled that even KZ said “Hey editors did you really want people to know how these letters actually come in, rather than editing them first?” (To which the editors answered “Yes”)

They spelled “masturbating” as “mastirbaiting” and didn’t capitalize their sentences for starters. It was like reading a CYS noob forum post.

Besides insulting Aaron. The letters page had been a thing long enough that you started seeing more and more of the same people writing in trying to out insult KZ or act “cool” in some other way, but of course that never worked. You’re writing a letter to a fucking comic book. You’ll never be cool.

(See? The Dead Letters pages DID start becoming more entertaining than the comic!)

Oh wait, before we move on to issue 20, I guess I should mention the back up story. Thankfully it isn’t Amy fucking up as usual, but it’s not really that much better.

The “Dead Killer” saga starts off with some typical brooding loner with the narration going on about what a bad ass he is the entire time. He’s training himself to be some sort of zombie killing machine. This training involves running about in his underwear in the woods and going melee with zombies, making traps, etc.

And that’s about it. Just him killing zombies and narration. Yeah, it’s boring.

On to issue 20.

Well this one starts off very much like 19 with Dan and Joey further distancing themselves from that small town they were in. Joey’s not sure if he can handle the outside world after living in a safe space like a tumblrina for a long time. Dan tells him he needs to man up and stop being a faggot because that’s exactly WHY they need to leave or else they won’t be able to handle the real dangers of the world.

Anyway enough of the remnants of the old shit, time for MORE new shitty characters.

Introducing Kirk and his buddy Raymond. They’re part of some gang called the “Zombie Killers” and have generally been treating the apocalypse like a nonstop zombie killing party but Raymond points out that there’s getting less and less of them and more and more zombies. The party’s over and they should split from the gang.

Kirk doesn’t need much convincing and they prepare to sneak off in the morning. The Appalachians get mentioned and so does DC so I think they’re somewhere in West Virginia or Virginia.

Well despite it being his idea, Raymond doesn’t last too long after they leave, getting a zombie fist right through his back by a big ass black zombie. (One of the readers actually wanted to see more ethnic zombies so I guess this was them listening to the fans) Kirk is left to fend off the zombies by himself. Most of the gooey zombie violence is in this storyline, so it’s at least good for that.

Meanwhile Wayne and Albert have an argument about pragmatism. Albert sees a camper being attacked through some binoculars. He thinks they should help the family, Wayne says, they’re zombie chow and they should take advantage of resting a bit while the zombies are preoccupied. A crying little girl is seen and Albert attempts to go in for a rescue, but Wayne stops him from being a retard by saying even if they could wade through the horde of zombies, where the hell are they going to put the little girl on the bike? Also how are they going to take care of her?

“Anyway, the case is closed. It doesn’t matter anymore.” - Wayne as the zombies have already eaten the little girl.

Finally back to big tits Stacy and her school girl crush on Indiana John.

Some guy named Hank tries to put the moves on Stacy, but she turns him down since John is the Alpha Chad here (Holy shit, her name is fucking STACY, I just realized that. No wonder she just looks annoying. The book was ahead of its time!)

Anyway after a lot of panels of inner monologue and hilarious model posing with her, John finally gets the hint that he’s supposed to be chasing her. So they totally fuck and while he’s asleep, she’s sad because she was hoping in his sleep he’d finally call out her name and not his dead wife Laura.

Fucking Christ I forgot how much I hated Stacy’s storyline. In fact, I’m starting to appreciate Albert and Wayne’s a little more now.

And now on to the back up Dead Killer story.

Yeah, it’s basically more narration about him being a badass. Except now it’s shown that he’s hunting KZ himself. At one point he’s got a dead bead on KZ’s fucking head and DOESN’T TAKE THE FUCKING SHOT because there wouldn’t be any challenge in that.

I take it back, this guy is even more of a fucktard than Amy.

Anyway, to show just how much of a badass he is, he goes toe to toe with a fucking graken nearly getting killed in the process and it’s only then he realizes that he’s still not nearly leveled up enough to do this shit even after blowing it up with a hand grenade.

So he figures he’ll troll KZ into a fight, by sending him a taunting message via arrow (shot into a zombie) about how he could have killed him but he wants to face him directly. KZ reads it and laughs since he’s definitely not planning on showing up by himself.

Letters pages again is more entertaining. More letters insulting Aaron and in one case a reader claiming to be female writes some letter going into about wanting to have sex with a dead guy and how the maggots wouldn’t be a problem but it might be a bitch to get him harder…and this is when KZ breaks in saying “Whoa whoa whoa, we’re not printing the rest of this letter, this isn’t some 900 number for kinky perverts. And this was probably a guy pretending to be a girl just to see what reaction he’d get.”

KZ might have answered readers with swear laden insults, but he still tried to keep it wholesome.

Moving on to 21

So this starts off with some chick who you probably don’t even recognize talking to herself in some ruined house. It probably doesn’t help that the artists keep changing quite a bit since the first issues, so some people don’t even look the same anymore (Dan and Joey for example are somewhat unrecognizable. Granted Joey’s grown up a bit, but Dan is really different looking)

Turns out this girl is Joey’s old girlfriend Jennifer where it’s pretty much implied that KZ eventually came to that town and horse fucked it hard. Jennifer’s mostly doing a lot of weeping over Joey since their last exchange wasn’t pleasant (Pissed about him leaving of course)

There’s some scenes of KZ taunting her with a bunch of those new and improved grakens that were promised. (They’re more spikey and armor plated)

But no more time for that, time to get back to Kirk fighting zombies in the forest. It’s a pretty action packed scene. Kirk uses everything he can to fight or distract the zombies, even going so far to throw the corpse of his buddy Raymond at the horde.At one point he skins the black zombie that killed his friend and wears it to fool the zombies into thinking that he’s one of them (Yep, did that trick long before The Walking Dead) He gets away.

Kirk’s not really that bad of a new character, he’s just a little odd looking due to his old style flattop haircut. (He’s even wearing a letterman’s jacket to complete that 1950s bully look)

Back to Wayne and Albert who stop at a gas station that’s still run by the mom and pop who own it. Since money’s no good anymore, Wayne does the adventurer thing. In exchange for food and gas, he offers to take care of the zombies in the nearby house that the mom and pop are little concerned will wander out of one day. It’s a deal and Wayne goes to clean out the zombies while Albert does nothing as usual.

Actually Wayne doesn’t do the adventurer thing at all, since he actually honors the deal and only takes the gas and food as promised. (And uses his barter skill for a little ammo too) A real adventurer would have just murdered them both after gaining the experience for killing the zombies and took everything. (Keeping Albert as a pack mule)

Happily no Stacy this issue, but we do get Dead Killer again. Well let’s get this over with.

KZ shows up and calls Dead Killer a retard for not killing him when he had the chance. KZ already knew DK booby trapped the whole area and didn’t give a shit since he brought all his zombies to trigger that shit anyway. He brought a graken as well. DK uses machine guns, fire and his traps, but none of it kills the target he’s really going for.

He survives the onslaught, or rather he manages to escape the onslaught, but not without getting bitten on his hand. Of course being Deadworld’s “Batman” he’s planned for this too. Now, it’s never been proven that a zombie bite turns you into one. In fact he’s not even sure of it, but he’s taken the precaution just to be sure that doesn’t happen.

He tourniquets his hand and CHOPS IT OFF and then shoves his stump into a bonfire before passing out like a dumb ass.

Of course if he’d just sniped KZ in the first place, he wouldn’t be a fucking cripple now.

Whatever, let’s get on with 22.

Starts with Stacy and John, but happily less Stacy this time. John’s group is in the middle of an argument. Some guy named Charlie thinks John is being retarded by leading them through the hinterlands rather than just grabbing some cars and driving up north instead. Before John tries to once again explain the point of all this, someone dies of a heart attack (Wow, getting to be more common nowadays) and then bites another dude.

Once again the question of “Do zombie bites cause you to become one?” pops up.

Well they don’t wait around to see because Charlie and his buddies are ready to kill the guy and even John reluctantly endorses it. Stacy is against this, but John just tells her to go make him a sandwich. (Sadly nothing that amusing, he just tells her to take the rest of the group while they shoot the potential plague carrier)

We then go back to Kirk still wandering about in the wilderness occasionally fighting some zombies here and there. He gets lucky by stumbling upon a pilot trying to lift off in a plane. He helps out with the zombies surrounding the plane though then he has to deal with the overly talkative pilot who won’t shut up about nonsense as he flies him out of there.

Charlie meanwhile has had enough of John’s shit and says they’re going back to one of the towns despite John going on about the libertarian paradise he’s going to lead them to because they have to only rely on themselves and can’t expect help from others like a parasite.

(John Galt? Charles Atlas? Atlas Shrugged? Maybe there was an Ayn Rand reference there)

He leaves with a group making John question himself as a leader, but Stacy is always around to stand by her man. He hugs her and his son Carl (Hey that’s also the name of Rick’s son from Walking Dead!)

Finally we cut back to Jennifer’s weird shit that’s jumping about in flashbacks. One moment she’s thinking about when Dan and Joey left, the next she’s thinking about when KZ attacked, and the next she’s wandering about in the “present day” of the ruined town. You get another look at those improved grakens. I’m assuming they might just be the males of the species due to being bigger and meaner looking. Plus they don’t have tits. Oddly, they do have eyes though.

In any case, it’s sort of pointless because Joey’s girlfriend (and especially Dan’s girlfriend Marla who is also shown) were never in the comic long enough to be too important. They’re like John’s farm girl 2.0.

And that’s it for the issue because rather than having more based Dead Letter pages, they had yet another short story advertising another comic they sold. At least this one didn’t have furries in it.

Finally issue 23

This one starts off with a flashback of KZ’s assault on Jennifer’s small town and how he just wrecked the place looking for Dan, Joey and Deake. When he doesn’t get the answers he wants, he starts killing what’s left of the population. He then finds a picture of Dan and Joey so now a he takes a bit more sadistic pleasure in torturing Marla. Jennifer passes out. She wake up to Marla being all fucked up and babbling. So she mercy kills her.

It’s a bit unclear if Jennifer’s dead or not at this point since the wandering zombies aren’t attacking. She tries to kill herself, but misses her brain, and she’s now all fucked up looking too. So she might very well be dead. Who knows, it’s too much past lingering on a character that didn’t really matter much.

Cut to…holy shit it’s Moloch and Renya! Been awhile since we’ve seen them. Moloch is in a wheelchair now, looking more like dimestore  Professor X and less like dimestore Anton LeVey.

They’re at some other survivalist city where they’re trying barter that leader by handing over Deake by claiming he’s important (Even though Moloch doesn’t know why). The leader is unimpressed, but Renya later on gets on his good side by fucking him, even though he’s planning on just killing Moloch.

Lurking nearby the same area is Bowker and the Vamp. Booker’s still plotting revenge on Moloch and the Vamp is still trying to get into Bowker’s pants. They’re apparently waiting for KZ to show up before moving forward with whatever it is they’re planning to do.

KZ is busily yelling at his zombies (and grakens) about how they’re fucking up and he’s gotta take the blame. A gate briefly open up and a smaller creature comes out of it.

“Oh this is fucking great, I ask for more help and he sends me a…shit I don’t even know what you’re supposed to be.” - KZ

The creature describes himself as an Oracle and he’s there to assist in locating a gate opener. He’s not attuned to Deake, but he is attuned to another gate opener that’s in the land of “the big hand”

So it’s up in Michigan of course. KZ is less than enthused that he now has to travel all the way up there.

And since we’re finally revisiting all the old characters, we finally get back to Donna who has undergone quite the transformation since her gang raping.

She’s now lifting weights and a tough biker bitch. Percy is still lingering around and doesn’t really like the biker camp, but Donna’s become twisted enough by this point that she likes it here and says how she doesn’t need to sleep with as many of them anymore. And even when she does, it’s just business.

Percy brings up Dan and Joey, but Donna doesn’t want to hear shit about them. She says if Dan’s even still alive, he left her behind and can go to hell.

And now we focus back on the new folks again, fortunately it’s Albert and Wayne. They’re cautiously staking out what seems to be an abandoned town. They’re walking around now since the bike apparently broke down. As Wayne’s still teaching Albert how to go about searching the town, Charlie and his people are nearby looking at them through rifle scopes and ready to fire.

And we’ll stop there on another cliffhanger.

So as you can see, they’re trying to gather all these new characters up in Michigan to meet up. Other than Stacy and to a lesser extent John, most of the new character aren’t as terrible as I remember. I just remember being really annoyed by the sudden introduction of all of them without the old ones.

It’s like yeah the old characters were meh, but if you are going to introduce new ones, at least connect them somehow to the old ones or introduce less disconnected groups of them at the same time.

Oh and the reader who claimed to be a girl wrote in again saying she really was a girl and wasn’t wearing any panties. KZ wanted proof though with a picture and an actual pair of her panties that she’d worn. And finally one of the readers says its pretty bad when he doesn’t know if he should read the letters page or comic first for entertainment.

Deadworld (Just shutdown this shit show)

Well at this point the series is drawing a lot of angry readers who really don’t give a fuck about any of these new characters. (“I don’t care about the Indiana Jones rip off and his militant whore!”) Hell some of the readers are saying they actually want to be following Joey and he was once one of the more annoying characters in the comic (Now he’s just dull and non-existent)

In fact issue 24 dispenses with KZ actually answering any of the letters this time since the staff go through the trouble of trying to explain themselves. (After some of the angry letter examples)

I’ve only touched on this aspect briefly but the artwork really is all over the fucking place now. It’s not even just a different style constantly, it’s actually been sucking a lot. Readers are angry about that too. The original artist Vincent Locke had that certain “rough draft” grainy black metal album style and you had that for like the first 9 issues. When Caliber took over, he wasn’t the only artist on the project anymore. In fact he was mostly drawing the back up stories like Amy.

Some of the other artists have been okay, but about issue 20 or so onward, the quality has been from passable to as shitty as Quiller’s work.

It might not be as noticeable if say the comic started out with that sort of illustration, but it’s not even like you get shit artwork one issue and passable artwork the next, you’re getting several different kinds of shit artwork within the same comic when they jump around between characters! (I guess they divided the character between the artists) It’s pretty jarring at times.

In any case, moving on to 24 with the storyline. (Such as it is)

Alright, so they show Wayne and Albert, well Wayne’s corpse anyway since he just got sniped by Charlie’s crew from last issue. Albert now without a protector is pretty much fucked and runs off only to eventually pass out from exhaustion. He’s found by Charlie’s crew who take him prisoner since he might be useful.

How the fuck is Albert useful in any way? Unless Charlie and the rest are planning on doing to him what the biker’s did to Donna, they might as well kill him since he wasn’t useful when he travelled around with Wayne. I guess they could be keeping him for cannibalism purposes too. Oddly, that has NOT popped up yet in the comic. (Remember, zombies aren’t human so they actually aren’t cannibals)

Cuts to Kirk who has decided he’s had enough of the overly talkative pilot and gets off at the next airstrip despite the pilot wanting him to stick around because they make a great “team.”

Kirk wanders around the ruins of some town, gathering loot until he meets some black dude in a bar he was searching. The black dude’s name is Clarence and he’s an ex-con that was in a maximum security prison when all this shit happened. (Second major black dude in the story and he was in prison. First one was a drug dealer. Lol)

It goes into a bit of a flash back of Clarence explaining how they tried to handle the zombie shit at the prison. That was actually alright.

Anyway Kirk and Clarence end up doing the whole bromance thing similar to that gif of Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenegger and decide they’ll travel together even if they aren’t sure where exactly they’re going yet. They drive off in some fancy car later with Kirk feeling sick due to drinking too damn much at the bar. Along the way they encounter a bunch of zombies crucified upside down to which Clarence says he’s heard of this practice being done to signal which roads are clear of zombies.

I’m exactly sure why this was considered a practical idea. It would be pretty damn risky just to crucify a living zombie (Upside down or not) let alone enough of them to put along side the roads. Plus zombies wander all over the fucking place, there wouldn’t really be a reliable way of keeping the major highways “zombie free.” At least not yet with how fragmented society still is.

This actually isn’t the first time you see this upside down zombie crucifixion though. Back when Percy’s taking a walk from Donna’s gang raping, you see some of this in the last panel as he’s watching the sunrise. There’s no elaboration on it though and it just seems like some shit someone put in the comic because they thought it was cool.

Anyway KZ is talking with this oracle creature and complaining about how he can only sense one gate opener that’s all the way up in fucking northern Michigan. He kicks a graken in frustration wondering how the hell he’s supposed to get an army of zombies up there so quickly, but then sees a train station nearby and figures he’ll just shove them all on board it and travel that way.

Finally Stacy is still pissy with John because of him being involved with shooting the guy who got bit, but John claims that he actually didn’t shoot him and the dude shot himself. John’s also aggressively trying to really build this community idea and is now planning on killing some looters in a nearby town so they can take stuff they need.

And somehow Albert shows up to the group. Apparently he’s already escaped from potential ass rape and luckily stumbled into John’s camp. (There’s only two John figures Al must have encountered Charlie and his crew and offers to let Albert stay. Albert plans on leaving to continue to go find his parents in Traverse City, but conveniently someone from John’s camp says he’s from there and the place is fucked. So having nothing else better to do, Al just stays with John’s people.

Stacy also has some dream about giving birth to a zombie baby and wakes up panicking about being preggo due to all the secks she’s had with John.

And like I said, there’s an extended letters page in this issue with a lot of readers bitching about various things and the editors trying to do damage control and explaining they’re just going to relaunch a new series of Deadworld after two more issues.

So on to 25

Starts out with some guy in a bell tower shouting at Charlie and then shooting him in the head. Charlie apparently got zombified sometime between 24 and 25. Anyway he’s dead and who cares.

Ray, the guy in the tower is about to die as well, but fortunately Kirk and Clarence are in the area and Clarence decides to help. Kirk once again is hung over because he can’t fucking handle his liquor, but he provides support fire.

They save Ray who turns out to be one of John’s scouts, so they head back to that group.

John’s group happens to be in town where the looters were and find a lot of supplies that got left behind. The plan is to go through a town called Wolverine (Again with that name) and get to Michigan’s upper peninsula where there should be more game to hunt and less zombies to worry about due to it being so remote.

Of course there’s probably still enough filthy Yoopers up there that I’d rather take my chances with the zombies.

Stacy asks dumb woman stuff like what about their relationship, but John’s too busy with playing post apocalyptic builder to pay attention to her delusions that this is a dating sim instead.

Clarence and Kirk arrive and explain that they saved Ray from zombies. Clarence goes on to explain that Ray told him that John is trying to establish a new libertarian utopia where a man is entitled to sweat of his brow and he wants to join up. (Albert is sitting nearby and expresses how happy he is to hear Charlie is dead since he killed Wayne)

Surprisingly despite Clarence saving one of his people thus proving that he’s no parasite, John cops an attitude saying he’ll decide who gets in the community and he’s not letting any freeloaders in. Clarence doesn’t get pissed, he even just says to just give them a couple days to prove themselves and if John feels they aren’t pulling their weight then they’ll leave. John says no deal.

Now, keep in mind John was all for letting Albert’s useless ass stay when he wandered into the group. One could just figure John’s secretly a RACIST and doesn’t want Clarence in because he’s a strong black man.

Speaking of which, Clarence goes into angry black man mode and yells at John saying he’s not getting through Wolverine without extra help and starts to leave. Stacy however stops him from doing so and asks how he knows to which Clarence says that he had to deal with the looters through there at one point and there will be three less to deal with if they go through there.

Stacy decides that he and Kirk should stay which now causes friction between her and John because she undermining his authority (for a BLACK man!) and says they look like killers. Stacy points out that most of their people aren’t killers. They aren’t even that great at fighting zombies, so having a few people like that might be necessary if they’re really going to establish this brand new society.

Next scene shows KZ with his horde stumbling upon an untouched old age home so he tells them to have a lunch break.

Back to John’s group where he’s planning on going around Wolverine to get to the UP, but Clarence shoots down his potential targets for rebuilding. The air force base sucks because if the government does ever re-establish itself, they’re not going to take kindly to squatters on there. Mackinaw island doesn’t have enough game and the prison in Marquette sucks since that’s where Clarence came from.

There’s a lot more rattling off of Michigan locations in general. Caliber sure was proud of being a Michigan based company. (And it was probably easier to use familiar territory) The plan changes to going through Wolverine via the river since skirting around it is going to waste time.

Cut back to KZ who has made the concerns about looters pointless since he’s just killed every human in Wolverine. KZ’s in a bad mood due to the oracle saying that the aura of the gate opener’s presence is fading and they need to go track it again.

John’s group manages to traverse the river and get to Mackinaw Bridge, but KZ’s already there with a horde of zombies which sets up for the last issue which is supposed to be a major battle.

Sure that sounds cool and all, but this is KZ facing a bunch of new shitheads that he doesn’t have any real history with. It’s not like he’s having a grand zombie showdown with Dan and Joey. (Not that would be much better considering Dan and Joey HAVE confronted KZ and fucked up the encounter during voodoo thing)

Comic ends with some entertaining letter pages. This time Aaron actually wrote in again and he backs down like a faggot causing KZ to call him out on being a back peddling sissy.

Alright finally issue 26.

This one has a long ass Deaditorial explaining why they’re exactly relaunching the series and how they’re trying to win back people that revolted from the series. They also promise that the comic book will be on time from now on (Lol, it’s still never on time)

Anyway let’s get this over with.

KZ is on one end of the bridge asking the oracle which human is the gate opener so he knows not to kill them. The oracle is as vague and useless as ever saying they’re somewhere on the other side within the group of humans.

“Fuck, I could have told you that!”

KZ also says he’s having a harder time controlling the horde from attacking since they’re pretty hungry now so the oracle better pinpoint which human it is soon.

John’s group decides to lead the zombies to the nearby Fort Mackinac and then blow up the bridge after the women and children cross the bridge. Stacy also gives some harsh reality to the faggots in the group that don’t want to kill zombies because “They used to be like us.”

“That’s right, and some used to be like little Ashley here and if you don’t defend her, Ashley’s brains are going to be decorating some zombie’s chin! Take the goddamn rifle and you’d better get used to it!”

Yeah, Stacy got a little better. Probably the artwork change (again) helped in her case since she’s drawn slightly less insufferable looking now. (And John doesn’t even look like Indiana Jones anymore)

Switch back to KZ who is just face palming at this point of the oracle’s news

“Let’s get this straight. The gate opener is an unborn fetus. So now I have to wait for it to not only be born, but also wait until the kid can talk. And on top of that, you’re still not even sure which woman is carrying the child.” - KZ
“Perhaps I could if we get closer.” - Oracle
“Closer? You bet your ass we’ll get closer.” - KZ

He orders an all out attack, because this has been a shit show since the trip to Michigan and it’s just time for a slaughter.

So you get several pages of the battle. John and Stacy are mostly the ones giving orders to their respective groups. The only named character that gets killed is Ray and he wasn’t really important anyway. It’s really not too bad of a battle though. They at least put in the effort.

The battle ultimately ends with the bridge getting blown up, escaping the horde and John and Stacy hugging and celebrating. Kirk and Clarence are around to celebrate as well. (Albert’s still around too, but who gives a shit)

Meanwhile KZ’s done with this whole Michigan adventure and he plans on heading back south to go find Deake. The oracle asks how they’re getting back, KZ says he’s finding a plane and flying back, he has no idea what the oracle is going to do.

And that’s it for the main story. At least in this “1st volume” I guess you could call it.

There is one more back up story in this comic, but it’s just a reprint of the last Amy mini-story. They openly mention that they’re retconning the beginning though where Amy was just floating in a void and sent by some other evil entity to go observe others of her kind.

Instead it just starts her off already on earth floating about looking for a body. Rest of the story is the same.

The intro also makes a big deal about how Amy is going to be playing a major role in the future for the series. So be prepared to see more supernatural ineptitude I guess.

Finally you get the very last dead letter pages ever in the Deadworld series. Now they actually claim they’ll be continuing the letters in the new Deadworld relaunch but sadly they never fucking do.

KZ gets some good last insults to the readers. Especially to one in particular that kept trying to out insult him and got so involved that he apparently drew gay porn of him fucking KZ in the ass and then going on in his letter about how it’s disturbing but at least he gets to “crack a nut” and DARES them to post the illustration.

Given that this fucktard drew gay necrophilia porn of himself, well that said more about him than anything else so a simple “We only post good illustrations in this book” was just as good of a come back as any.

Okay, now that’s REALLY it for this first batch of Deadworld comics.

As much as all the new characters getting introduced really brought the comic down due to fragmentation, towards the end it did started picking up a bit, but that’s mainly due to by the time it ended they had grouped all these new folks together and we got to know them a bit more.

Arguably the only new guy that came off as a little interesting was Clarence and he was introduced really late in the game. It helped he had a bit more back story. Kirk was okay, though he never gets much characterization other than he’s good at surviving. Hell, as soon as he meets Clarence he takes a back seat!

Granted Stacy and John had more backstory, but ugh, they just sucked. Yeah, they both got a little better, but then the series ended.

Albert is one of those characters where I get that they might have been trying to do something different by focusing on someone who wasn’t a natural fighter/leader but he’s just not all that interesting without Wayne around. And after Wayne dies, well he’s just sort of in the background.

As for the OG folks, well considering they don’t show up much after issue 18 or so, opinion on them doesn’t change since last time.

Of course when the relaunch starts all these characters will be explored so we’ll see if the series improves again.

But before we get to that, there’s one of the larger mini-series that will be reviewed first and that’s “To Kill a King.” It’s one of the few side stories that has a specific place in the Deadworld timeline (Namely right between the old and new series)

If the title isn’t obvious, the protagonist in that one is Dead Killer because you can never have enough brooding loner types in comic books.

Well, we’ll see how it goes anyway.

Deadworld (To Kill a King)

Alright, so this first one starts off in a carnival. There’s like three pages of “setting the mood” by going on about what the carnival used to be and what it is now, etc. But that’s all boring bullshit, we’ll just get on with what’s going on character wise.

So The Vamp and Bowker are here together and the Vamp has gathered all the carnies that are still left alive into a truck presumably to use them as food for the zombies. At least that’s what Dead Killer believes while he’s spying on the carnival from far away. He also thinks Bowker must be another talking zombie since he’s hanging out with them.

The Vamp isn’t too happy right now because her body is starting to rot and she needs a new one. She offers to gum Bowker into ecstasy since her teeth are falling out, but as usual Bowker isn’t going for it. Vamp notices Bowker’s been checking out the Tattoo lady so she figures he likes tattoos, to which Bowker just replies he likes them alive.

Bowker wanders off alone and get ambushed by Dead Killer who realizes he’s human. He’s wondering what the fuck he’s doing with zombies to which Bowker lies and says biding his time. Well, he’s probably not lying completely since Bowker really isn’t happy with traveling around with the Vamp, but he doesn’t have many options right now.

He convinces DK that he can scout out the situation better since he’s able to walk around the carnival freely and that he’ll be right back. DK doesn’t fully trust him, but gives him ten minutes.

Bowker predictably snitches to Vamp who is holding a little game with the carnies to see who will survive the zombies. Tattoo lady though is getting taken somewhere else.

Cuts back to DK who is sick of waiting and is ready to go in the carnival himself, but then he gets blinded by flash camera lights and smacked hard on the back of the head. When he wakes up he sees Bowker and the Vamp. Calls Bowker a traitorous asshole to which Bowker makes a speech saying the zombies are winning and he’s doing what it takes to survive. He’s not joining up with some one handed lone nut that’s out for revenge.

The Vamp likes this speech and does her usual flirty routine with Bowker, but he just calls her a sick disgusting bitch and walks off. She tells him though he really should try necrophiliia and he’s adamant that he ain’t and definitely not with her.

Since Bowker is playing hard to get, the Vamp turns her attention to the tied up DK. She points out since he really can’t refuse her, he might as well enjoy himself. She has some hanging zombie on the ceiling to be an audience.

So before she can conduct her aggressive mating strategy, DK gets loose and smacks the shit out of her. I should go on to mention that despite having one hand, he’s got a poor man’s “Ash” replacement in the form of a blade and retracts from the metal stump piece he’s got. It’s no chainsaw, but it gets the job done.

So the Vamp being more of a lover than a fighter tries to get away, but he manages to stab her through the back and out her chest pinning her to a pole. He questions her on how many more talking zombies are there, to which she just avoids the question going on about how he likes to play rough and she’s getting really turned on.

Realizing he’s getting nowhere, he states that Bowker was right about one thing, she is one sick bitch and he pulls his arm up so the blade slices her head in two vertically.

Cut to King Zombie getting out a truck with a graken riding on top of it and I have no idea why the hell KZ is wearing a basketball shirt. Seriously, he’s NEVER seen without his iconic leather biker jacket. He’s still got the sunglasses and bandana, but I’m going to guess he lost the jacket during his flight from Michigan.

KZ questions Bowker where the Vamp is and why the hell there are humans all over the place, then he figures it’s the Vamp playing her dumb shit games as usual. Bowker shows KZ the picture they took of DK and recognizes it as the one who had the balls to try to attack him the first time so he sets out to find Vamp while telling the zombies to just attack the carnies already.

The carnies try to fight through the zombie crowd with the fat man leading the charge since he knows he can’t outrun them.

Bowker and KZ head to the funhouse where the Vamp was, but all they encounter is the Tattoo Lady running and screaming for someone to save her, to which Bowker says that she’s with him now which means the zombies can’t touch her and kills one of them.

KZ is amused by all this claiming that Bowker finally got himself a “real” girlfriend and doesn’t give a shit. He figures he’ll let Bowker keep the tatted up whore and in the meantime goes to find the whore that was supposed to be looking after things here.

In the middle of scolding the graken that’s traveling with him, the graken gets its head blown off causing KZ to run away from the ensuing bullet storm. KZ escapes the funhouse via slide to the outside with DK not far behind. They both run right past Bowker and Tat lady fucking in the bushes (Interrupting them)

DK fires several shots finally downing KZ and threatens to blow his head off if he doesn’t call off the graken and the zombies. The carnies are now safe (Save for the fat man who died of a heart attack during the fight) and he tells them to tie the graken up to the ferris wheel.

Lol, whut?

Okay, there’s a shitload wrong with this scene.

First off, DK is holding the gun in his stump. Like I know he’s got some sort of trigger mechanism so the stiletto comes out, but I don’t know how the fuck he can pull a gun trigger even if he’s got a way to hold the fucking pistol in the metal stump to begin with.

Second of all, tying up a fucking graken? Seriously, the grakens are KILLING MACHINES. They used to show how badass they were killing entire groups of armed survivors. And now you’re telling me a bunch of carnies are going to be able to tie one up? And yeah I get that KZ told it to back off, but that leads to the third problem which is…

KZ even capitulating to all these demands in the first place. Even at gun point I don’t see him giving in since he’d just point out that he’s the only thing holding the graken back from killing DK (and everyone else) in the first place.

Now I’m going to point out why all this REALLY doesn’t make sense a little later, but I won’t get ahead of myself until that time comes. (Which will be later in this post anyway)

The comic ends with DK questioning what KZ is exactly to which he responds that he’s so much more than he could imagine. DK shoots and kills KZ and then punches out the nearby Bowker telling him to go report back to all his talking zombie “friends” that the human race is taking the world back.

So that’s the first issue and killing off KZ was definitely their way of trying to shock folks into reading what was going to happen next. I mean they already killed KZ in the very first issue of the mini-series and he’s the main villain of Deadworld!

But of course you KNOW he’s not really dead right?

On to issue two.

So KZ is dead and now the remaining carnies are getting their jollies from killing of the lingering zombies. Bowker can’t believe he’s really dead and just stands with tat girl who asks if they should join in helping, but Bowker’s like nah, the carnies deserve to have all the fun.

Soon, the fat man shows up to which one of the carnies says they thought he was dead, which is then followed by fat man making all of the carnies dead. He then tells Bowker and Tat girl to get behind him so the zombies don’t attack. Fat Man then reveals of course that he’s really KZ that’s just taken a new body.

Meanwhile cut to DK who is stalking some girl that he likes. No seriously, there’s a very small community that it’s stated that he just guards from afar so he can watch this girl do her laundry  or whenever she comes outside. She actually knows he’s stalking her, but she’s sort of into that because it isn’t like there’s too much in the way of choices nowadays. She just wishes he’d just knock off the incel shit and slay her pussy with as much enthusiasm as he slays zombies.

Speaking of which, it goes back to Bowker who is with tat girl and thinking that he’s never going to be free of KZ now, but he takes his mind off that when tat girl insists that they go back to fucking. So afterwards, Bowker’s all happy and the tat girl says “See? I told you a little necrophillia wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

Yep, it was Vamp the whole time.

“What you do you think he’s the only one that can take a new body?”

Doh!

The Vamp then says how he really knows how to hurt a girl’s feelings having forgotten about “her” already.

While Bowker is having a break down from slaying zombie pussy, Vamp is going on about how she managed to keep the spark of life flickering a bit to keep the body warm, halt the rotting process a bit longer, etc.

Also mentioning that at least she had the girl smothered so as not to leave any unsightly wounds.

So she finally got him in the tried and true “RAEP via deception.” The classics never die.

While this is all funny shit, it sort of brings up the question of why the hell KZ didn’t recognize the Vamp immediately in the funhouse. Surely these entities can probably sense each other right? I mean I guess you could claim that they did know and this was some elaborate troll on Bowker, though KZ doesn’t seem to be into playing games like Vamp does (and especially not concerning someone like Bowker)

This also brings up the question of if KZ knew he could just take a body at any given time, why capitulate to DK’s demands when he had him at gunpoint? Could have told him to fuck off and had the graken kill him after he got “killed.”

Again, you could claim that was to long troll DK into some false sense of security and get him later, but KZ seemed pretty determined to kill him the first time around and even mentioned to DK that he was an idiot for not taking the shot during the first showdown. If he was playing games with DK, he really wasn’t taking his own advice.

Besides the trolling theory is dispelled in the next page.

KZ in his new fat suit is ranting at his graken to go find more humans to kill, (even little babies!) and sending his zombies to hunt for DK. It is at this point the Vamp becomes more of a voice of reason saying he’s the one always telling her that they got work to do and not play games.

KZ says he’s not playing games, he wants DK for “killing him.” In fact he wants him so badly that he’s managed to find more humans to hunt DK down since maybe they’ll have better luck than the zombies. (Where he found skilled mercenary humans on such short notice is a bit of a mystery, unless he’d always had them on standby)

Vamp points out that aren’t they supposed to be looking for Deake, but KZ says later and that this is personal.

Might be just me but they really make KZ more cartoonishly over the top villain in this mini-series, but then DK is sort of a brooding loner hero stereotype, so the two go together I guess. (Doesn’t help that KZ is an angry fat bastard now. Lol)

Despite being a cartoonishly over the top evil fat man, he’s still more interesting than DK who I’m going to just skip over his part where it’s more narration of him doing broody introspection and looking for a flower to bring to the girl he likes

Vamp tries to make Bowker feel better by pointing out that he’s not the only human that sold out his race and offers to make him REALLY feel better since they got some more time. Bowker of course is back to telling her to fuck off.

KZ goes with the human traitors to the place where they think DK is and of course that place turns out to be the little farm community he normally protects. Good going DK, while you were picking flowers, you let the place get invaded.

After shooting several of these farmers, one of them gets the drop on KZ and tells him to get off his bike and start talking.

Lol, whut?

These assholes came in and started shooting up the place and people. You get the drop on their leader and you DON’T shoot him immediately? Really starting to think they were going for a mainstream comic style with how retarded everyone acts.

After a bit of talking, the townies figure he’s talking about DK and they’re not exactly fond of him either since he creeps around the outskirts of the town like a creeper. They also say he didn’t show up until the girl he liked showed up. KZ catches wind of that and tries to get her, but the guy holding him at shotgun point threatens him. KZ calls his bluff, gets his belly blown out and then grabs the gun to blow off the dude’s head.

He then takes DK’s crush to bait him later.

Cut to the Vamp running into a group of survivors playing the damsel routine. One of them immediately takes advantage of the situation and say if she wants food and safety, then she’s gotta work for it. So she starts sucking his dick (As she likes to do) while the other guys remark about how much she’s actually into it and then of course comes the part where she bites his dick and balls off and takes the others prisoner presumably to fuck them and eat them later.

DK finally walks into the small farm community for the first time with his flowers and he senses something wrong due to how quiet it is. Then he’s ambushed by the human mercs where upon a fight ensues and he kills them all.

One of the townies says they were perfectly fine until DK showed up, DK demands to know where crush is and starts beating on the townie copping an attitude with him until one of the other townies tells him a fat talking zombie took her

Cut to KZ in his fat suit talking to DK’s crush and going on about how she’s about to witness the power of the dead and how awesome that is. Never needing to eat, drink, get tired, etc. The whole time he’s doing this he’s cutting away all of his fat flesh (Too cumbersome to move about in) down to just the muscle and bones and tells her to look upon the FUTURE.

Yeah, once again over the top cartoon villainy.

Alright on to the last issue of this mini-series

Starts off with DK tracking KZ. KZ meanwhile is waiting around with Bowker and Vamp for DK to show up. Vamp has the two guys she recently captured under the pretense of questioning them for info, but it’s mainly wanting them for her own pleasure.

Vamp also gives another comment in passing about how there’s enough spark of life to keep the hair and finger nails to grow and muscles from locking up. Honestly this is just sort of an in-universe way of trying to explain how exactly KZ is going to go back to looking like he did originally (Namely a high mullet with really long hair) Right now he’s just looking like one of those body exhibits except with clothes on (And at least he’s got a leather jacket and sunglasses again)

KZ also says Bowker can keep DK’s girl after they kill him with the taunt that he might like a living girlfriend for a change.

DK captures one of the human mercs that was hunting him and questions where KZ is exactly. He promises not to kill him for the info, so he just keeps him tied up upside down and cuts him a little saying that the blood should attract zombies, but then of course he’s working with them so surely his zombie friend won’t hurt him.

Next you get Bowker and DK’s girlfriend talking a bit while he gives her some food. Once again it’s questioned of how he can work with the zombies and once again Bowker makes the excuse that he’s biding his time.

DK’s girlfriend begs Bowker to help since if DK “killed” KZ once, he can do it again. She even offers to fuck Bowker which takes him a bit by surprise, but he doesn’t believe in DK’s chances and he said the risk isn’t worth the reward and turns her down.

Y’know, Bowker could have just fucked her and then went back on his word, but I suppose even he’s not that much of a scoundrel. (Either that or he got a taste for zussy now and living girls just don’t do it for him anymore)

And in keeping on the same theme, KZ makes Bowker watch a bunch of zombies eat some humans. He doesn’t really want to watch, but KZ makes him as a reminder to not get thoughts of guilt for betraying humanity to save his own miserable life. Meanwhile Vamp is going on about how much this really turns her on.

She tells KZ later that she wants DK’s girl’s body unharmed after all this is done since she wants to change into it, KZ says “Well I did promise her to Bowker, so okay.”

So eventually DK shows up and says to let his girl go. Of course KZ isn’t inclined to listen since getting “killed” again isn’t going to do shit and he’s the only one holding the zombies back from eating his girlfriend.

ZK explains that he was going to keep her as a sacrifice to open the gate, but he’ll let her go if DK takes her place. DK agrees and she’s released. She reluctantly runs off and now KZ beats the shit out of DK and comes up with something to do with him since just killing him is just too easy. (And doesn’t give DK the opportunity to escape later on)

So he starts breaking DK’s legs with a mallet while playing one of those carnival ring the bell games. Meanwhile Bowker is a little unhappy looking which Vamp calls him out on, and he just says she wouldn’t understand. To which she answers that he’s right and she doesn’t give a shit because they got work to do and head to the nearby city that those two humans she captured earlier told her about.

DK holds his metal stump to his head threatening to kill himself with the spring blade saying he’ll lose him as a sacrifice and as a zombie. KZ wonders if he’d really do it though. KZ says he’s hurt pretty badly and the pain is probably getting to the point where he feels like passing out. His arm is probably getting heavy. KZ says they’ll just wait and they can talk again later when he wakes up and then DK passes out like a faggot rather than going through with it right then and there. Granted he was a fucktard for allowing himself to get in that position in the first fucking place.

Vamp and Bowker are on the road and see a mob of humans on the road heading towards KZ’s position. Bowker decides that they can’t fight so he take a detour. Vamp wants to go back and help KZ, but Bowker refuses saying KZ will be fine and that they can observe from a nearby hill and they can check things out later. Surprisingly Vamp agrees to this plan.

Cut back to KZ and DK in some abandon cabin where DK is just waking up. Unfortunately for KZ, round two of torturing him is cut short due to the mob of humans approaching and cutting down all his zombies outside. KZ also learns that DK’s retractable blade was broken this whole time and laughs about getting bluffed. He’s about to shoot DK saying how useless he’s going to be as a zombie with broken legs, but since he spent so much time gloating and playing around, he gets shot and drops his own pistol.

DK grabs it and tries to shoot him, but fails and passes out just as KZ runs off. KZ also wonders where the hell the shots came from.

Meanwhile Bowker from the hill is watching with a scoped rifle which implies that he was the one that shot KZ. He returns to the truck where the Vamp asks if KZ got away to which Bowker affirms that he did. Vamp mentions they’re supposed to meet up with KZ at the city and asks what’s going on down there. Bowker says nothing anymore and that they should be okay.

Vamp is a bit surprised of how civil Bowker is being with her and he just says sometimes people can change.

And once again a lot of problems here. Bowker had a scoped rifle so why the hell didn’t he just shoot KZ in the fucking head? Now it could be that Bowker isn’t a perfect shot and/or the rifle isn’t the greatest. That’s fine, but one would wonder why the fuck Vamp would just be standing back at the truck and not being exactly there to watch what Bowker was doing. Again that could be arrogance on her part believing that Bowker is totally dedicated to being a traitorous human.

Ignoring these two things, the intelligent thing for Bowker to have done if he REALLY wanted to be free of zombie rule is kill Vamp (It’s just her after all and he already easily overpowered her physically in the truck when she wanted to go back for KZ), then headshot KZ from the hill and then drive away in the truck. The ONLY explanation of why he didn’t do this is he isn’t confident that he’d survive without some sort of group protection after pissing off Vamp and KZ for killing them. (But then, why risk killing KZ in the first place?)

Anyway last page is DK’s girl finding him all fucked up in the cabin saying that her community came with her to help him since if he’s going to save the human race he needs to be apart of it. He makes some loner comment about how he’s got a long way to go to which his girl says they’ll do it together.

Fin.

Okay, well despite some of the obvious issues I pointed out as I went along, I actually didn’t mind this mini-series, though DK himself isn’t all that compelling. He’s not terrible, but you’ve seen his type before a lot.

Arguably the character that’s the most interesting is Bowker since when you see him in the beginning of the OG series, he’s some hard ass drill sergeant type that generally acts like a para-military badass. Him going through this whole broken and conflicted traitor arc is definitely not what you’d think of with first impressions of his introduction.

As for KZ and Vamp, well like I said, they’re a little more Saturday morning over the top villains in this. Well KZ is anyway. Vamp pretty much is always over the top with her sex drive. In any case, other than some face palming moments with certain decisions, it’s not excessively terrible.

Anyway next update will start on the relaunch of the series. We’ll see if they manage to bring back the quality.

But then, why risk killing KZ in the first place?

It sounds to me like Bowker is a really good shot and knew his shot wouldn’t kill. He doesn’t want to kill KZ because he doesn’t want to piss him off.  However, his guilty conscience makes him shoot KZ to save DK, and he rightly concludes that KZ wouldn’t know who shot him unless he dies.

Could be the case, though he says "Damn" after watching KZ run off which makes it sound like he wanted to kill him of course maybe he was just hoping DK would have enough strength to finish the job.

Deadworld (The Relaunch!)

Alright back to the series proper. Let’s see how long it takes for them to fuck it up again.

So one thing they dod away with is all the different covers stuff. Actually they sort of did away with that towards the end of the old series. They do make an exception for this first issue, though it’s not so much of a different cover as it is an extra one. Basically there was a limited edition version that had a jet black cover

Subtle, but still metal.

However there was the cover of the regular comic inside. So you basically got a comic with double covers.

I probably should be taking more pics of the comic in general, but I’m lazy.

Anyway the first few pages are nothing but text to establish what went on in the first 26 issues (And the Dead Killer mini-series) sort of like I’ve been doing here except with less swearing and criticism.

With that all out of the way, we move on to the first character focus.

It’s Indiana fucking John and he’s fucked. There’s a lot of narration of why the hell he’s wandering around in the Michigan wilderness catching frostbite. He’s out looking for his son Chris who got lost.

Chris? His son’s name was CARL! Already fucking up the continuity!

Anyway, he realizes this was a retarded thing to do during a blizzard, but he just couldn’t not look for his son, even if he turned out to be dead. There’s a lot of self-reflection going on of how all his plans of building a libertarian paradise failed as hard as Rapture, his relationship with his militant whore Stacy had gone south, and now he was getting tired and just wanted to fall asleep.

Then he sees his own footprints in the snow meaning he’s been going in circles and even worse, there’s footprints of others that look like they were probably made by bare feet. Zombies are in the area.

He’s going to die no matter what, so he does the only thing he can think of to make it as painless as possible. He strips butt ass naked and just runs through the snowy forest until he eventually succumbs to the cold and collapses. Freezing too death before the zombies get to him.

And that’s it for ol’ John number 2.

It’s an acceptable start.

Well somewhat anyway since the next scene is Stacy though she’s with Kirk saying she’s still holding out hope that John’s still alive, but Clarence comes back with one of John’s boots saying he’s not coming back. There’s only a few left in the settlement John tried to build and most of them want to go to Minneapolis to live in the Mall of America

Kirk and Clarence tell Stacy of their own plan of going to the Caribbean to have an entire island to themselves. Stacy isn’t sure about the plan, but Clarence mentions that Albert used to talk about the islands and how all they would have to do is clean one out.

Then its at this point that you find out that Albert isn’t around either since Stacy says how will they let him know where they’ve gone. Clarence say he hasn’t been seen in two month so he’s not coming back either. Stacy realizes that’s probably true so she says she’ll think about the proposal to head south. Turns out Kirk really likes Stacy so he’s really hoping she’s going with them.

Next scene is Bowker with some other dude named Ted. They’re scouting out a ruined city while Ted’s saying how creepy the Vamp is and that Moloch is probably dead. Bowker agrees with both points, but as long as Vamp is keeping him alive and he’s helping her out, he’s surviving. He also mentions about bidding his time (as usual) to escape the Vamp, but he’s gotta be really sure he’s got some group to hook up with for protection.

Despite him telling Ted to stick with him, ol’ Ted’s already dead from a slit throat by some large thug. Accompanying the thug is Renya. Bowker has some words for her since the last time he saw her he got left behind. Renya explains that it was necessary since Moloch was hurt so badly and tries to convince Bowker to come back to work for Moloch again since they’re getting ready to rebuild their operations even better than ever. Bowker is reluctant until Renya mentions hearing about his “girlfriend” and then he wants to talk more.

Next scene is a flashback nightmare that Deake is having about issue 3 of the old series. He mumbles about not wanting to open the gate again in his sleep.

Next is a scene of shortly after Donna’s been in the biker camp (Apparently they’re called Demon Wheels) a week. She’s miserable, getting abused, raped and having to clean the dishes. Percy being somewhat useful, mentions there’s a raid tonight and they could possibly escape when that’s going on.

However, one biker is left to specifically look after Donna during the raid, so she doesn’t escape just more rape.

This is a bad dream of the past though that she wakes up from, since now she’s Clay’s girl and is just part of the biker group as an ‘ol lady.

Next up is a bunch of fucking text with some images of shit that happened in issues from the old series. The text is basically Albert’s journal going on about his thoughts during the Michigan adventure. Of particular note is he mentions that he was still at John’s camp because he also really liked Stacy.

Okay, I get it. There’s a lack of women, but…Stacy is still just fucking insufferable looking. I know what it is. She looks like a glamorous comic book version of Axiom.

Anyway we see Albert hiding his little diary showing that he’s not actually dead. He then wanders over to the crowd wondering what’s going on since there’s a cloud of smoke.

KZ is with some zombies (and back to his usual looking self), a graken and that oracle that sent him to Michigan. The cloud of smoke is another one of those oracle creatures.

“Oh this is just fucking great. Another one of you guys that can’t do shit.” - KZ

This oracle says he’s been sent to locate a gate opener, and one is within 100 miles of the location. He also says it’s Deake which finally makes KZ very happy.

He then asks if they’re only tuned in to one gate opener. The answer is yes, so KZ comes to the conclusion that oracles are pretty much useless unless their gate opener is either nearby or someone useful (Like not an unborn baby)

You know where this is going…

The old oracle points out that they can also act as valuable advisors, but KZ doesn’t want advisors, he wants to take out his anger on someone that sent him on a wild goose chase, so he beats the old oracle’s head in with a heavy branch.

The new oracle points out that the Boss won’t be happy about that, to which KZ says the boss can go fuck off and do this himself since KZ’s been doing all the heavy lifting while the Boss doesn’t even send any useful help.

The oracle points out that the Boss is actually here and has been for quite some time, but his train of thought his interrupted when he sees Albert. KZ says that Albert’s fine since he’s with him to write a book.

The oracle goes on to say that the Boss’ essence got split into two parts when the gate closed abruptly during the time Deake was trying to open the gate the second time and got interrupted. So he’s technically on earth but it’s not even clear if the Boss knows who he even is and both halves need to be reunited before the gate can be permanently opened!

It’s like when you get a quest and midway through they give you all these mini-tasks before you can complete it.

KZ’s like now how the fuck is he supposed to find all this shit.

The oracle mentions that he’ll know the physical aspect when he sees it, but that’s all he can do. The spiritual aspect the oracle already has a bit of knowledge on due to it taking a persona that one of their scouts engaged once. He mentions it is constantly body hopping in an attempt to find the right one and it refers to itself as Amy.

(Yep, they finally worked Amy into it already)

And lastly, you get a scene of Joey and Dan. They’re watching some encampment from far away or rather Joey is and complaining that Dan is asleep and they should just go down there and try to do some work for food since he’s not afraid of a bunch of bikers (Joey, still a fucking idiot) then he sees Donna and wakes up Dan.

On to issue 2

While they dispensed with the alternate cover thing, they still had some gimmicky covers with this relaunch. This comic had a double front cover thing where you had to flip the comic upside down to read the other one. Why they did this I’m not exactly sure since this is usually a gimmick reserved for a different comic that was less well known and a way to promote it.

However, this was just more Deadworld, there was no real reason for this other than to have a quirky comic layout.

Well anyway, one of the stories sort of does have an event that precedes the other so we’ll start with that one first.

Starts off with Donna talking to one of the newest rape slaves (Nancy) that the Demon Wheels have acquired. She’s pretty distraught about her situation, but Donna tells her if she’s going to survive she needs to do what she did and eventually one will “claim” her and she’ll only have one disgusting pig to deal with. Donna goes on to say that going along until the time is right is the safest choice and that that time is coming soon.

Percy interrupts saying the camp has visitors and Donna goes to check what the crowd is gathering around and then she sees Dan and Joey who apparently didn’t come up with a better plan than just walk in the damn camp.

Next couple pages is more of Albert’s journal shit. He’s mostly going on about KZ, Vamp, the grackens, the oracle and Bowker. He also recounts some of the events from “To Kill a King” since Bowker briefly mentioned some of it to him. (About how KZ can’t really be “killed” in the traditional sense)

Albert then mentions how he wound up in the company of zombies in the first place. He says he ran away from John’s camp since he fell in love with Stacy, but since she friend zoned him (Or always saw him as a “brother”) his chances were pretty much nil. He also mentions that she lost the baby (Which means that oracle REALLY wasted KZ’s time!) and even though she had broken up with John, he could see that Kirk was next in line to hit that shit. Not wishing to deal with this all over again and he sort of sucked at the whole rebuilding civilization thing anyway, he proposed to leave and find other settlements but nobody went with him. Lol.

In any case he wound up getting captured by zombies and fortunately (or unfortunately) for him these were under the direct control of KZ and when he found out that Albert was a journalist, KZ decided to keep him around to write a book about what was going on, but to focus on him specifically. Albert was too afraid to ask KZ who was going to be around to read it though. Albert hopes he can hook up with a large group of humans so he can get away and then mentions that KZ has just lead his horde to a well fortified city so he might get his chance soon.

KZ gives a few orders to his zombies and then asks if Albert got all that to which Albert says no because he doesn’t understand zombie talk.

(I suppose I should have mentioned this LONG before, but sometimes you see KZ talking in a weird symbol type language. It’s usually when he’s giving orders to zombies or the graken)

KZ tells Albert that the plan is they’re going to give demands to the human city or they attack, so Albert asks what the demand is, and KZ says that Deake is in the city and the demand will be to hand him over. Albert then asks who exactly Deake is and KZ mentions he’s a gate opener and when the gates are finally opened the true horror will begin.

Cut to…Punk and Eddie. Yep, they’re still around, though they’re sneaking outside the HQ apartment looking to see if Moloch is alive somewhere. Punk is wondering if this all that great of an idea since Moloch never exactly liked them and Jaxon (The leader of this current city) might think they’re loyal to him and have them killed. Eddie tells him to stop bitching and just help him.

Sort of a change up of their personalities. Usually it was the taller one (Punk) that was coming up with all the “grand ideas” while Eddie (the short one) was always going on about how the ideas were actually bad. There’s also some missing pieces of what exactly happened since the last time we saw them which was them running into Bowker and the Vamp. Unless they’re supposed to be helping Bowker this whole time, though they don’t mention him.

They end up stumbling into a dark basement where they find a chained up Wolverine in all his swastika forehead glory. Since he looks crazed and pissed, they turn off the light on him only to hear the breaking of chains as both of them make remarks that they think they pissed their pants.

Cut back to the Demon Wheels biker camp where Dan’s getting beat up by Clay who is asking where the rest of his people are. Dan says the last place they left was Monroe like he told them before. Clay says bullshit since the place got destroyed by zombies. Clay leaves saying he’s got three hours before they resume their conversation and he better tell them more or he’ll cut him up and feed him to zombies.

Joey is freaking out since if Monroe got wiped out that means his old girlfriend Jennifer and Dan’s second girlfriend Marla are probably dead. Dan says he doesn’t know that since they might have escaped. (They didn’t of course) Donna then chimes in saying that he leave yet another girlfriend behind to the zombies too? Dan tries to say he thought she was dead, but Donna just slaps him and walks off.

Next page seems to hint that a bit of time has passed as Joey comes back to Dan saying that he’s talked with Donna a bit about how she escaped, but she’s still pissed at Dan. Dan says to hell with her then if she wants to stay here, but they need to get out.

Joey, continuing to be an idiot says that this biker camp isn’t so bad and is actually pretty safe. He tells Dan that Donna says they always treat new people rough so that they know their place and then things cool down. (Repeated gang rape is a little worse than just treating new people “rough” I’d say.) Joey goes on to say he’s tired of running all the time and besides Donna and Percy are here so he feels they should all stick together.

Wait a minute, Joey never even liked fucking Percy!

Dan says that’s a retarded idea and he’s not going to just sit around getting his face punched in by someone trying to prove how tough they are. He mentions he’ll escape and check in a couple days and if anyone wants to leave, he’ll help them escape.

Next page indicates yet a bit more time has passed and now Donna is approaching Joey saying that she probably was a little hard on Dan. Just that she wished for so long that he’d show up and then after she long gave up hope, he suddenly arrives. She mentions how Joey’s gotten so big and hugs him, to which he says Dan should be the one she hugs and she asks where is he, to which he explains Dan escaped, but plans on checking up in a couple days.

Donna panics since she realizes that’s why Clay and some others left in such a hurry, they set up a trap expecting him to escape. She runs off to try to do something, only to hear a gunshot.

Next scene is Dan getting shot as he’s running through the woods, and then gets shot a second time with Clay holding a pistol on him saying that Donna told him he was tough, but that he doesn’t seem so tough. Dan makes a remark about being tough always depends on what side of the gun you’re on.

Clay makes one more statement about not liking him the moment he saw him and “You know what I do to people I don’t like?”

“This.”

Followed by a gun close up and a fantastic “BLAM!” comic sound effect.

And on that note, we flip the comic over and read the other plotline.

Starts off with some soldier talking with the Vamp and whispering a bit of poison in her ear that Bowker probably has a thing for Renya and implying that their current meeting is involving fucking. The Vamp isn’t the jealous type though and she already notices that this soldier is looking at her pretty hard so they go into the back of the truck to fuck.

Bowker is talking with Renya and they’ve apparently come to an agreement where he’s going to help her and Moloch get back into power though he doesn’t understand why she just doesn’t use this Jaxon as a puppet instead since she’s already got him hooked in, but she mentions Jaxxon is an idiot that doesn’t have any long range planning and obviously she can’t become the leader because the men are not going to take orders from a woman. She even mentions she could try to put Bowker in power, but they don’t know him well enough.

Bowker warns Renya that he’s not going to get horse fucked by her and Moloch again to which she promises that won’t happen and he’ll have a sizable slice of the power pie (Like the old days) when the take over occurs.

Bowker leaves wondering where the hell one of his soldiers is only to find him half eaten in the back of the truck with the Vamp hovering over him. Vamp asks if Renya went for the plan, to which Bowker says she did and they have to go into town and wait for her call. Vamp asks if they should go tell KZ about this first, but Bowker says it would be better if they didn’t alert any suspicion, he also says that he explained to Renya about the Vamp and that she goes where he goes which causes Vamp to remark that she didn’t know he cared.

One might wonder why Renya would be cool with Bowker hanging out with smart zombies in any capacity, unless she doesn’t realize the Vamp is actually a zombie which could very well be the case. The Vamp herself once again gives a poor showing of critical thinking by just obeying Bowker’s statement of not contacting KZ about all this. But she really does SIMP pretty hard for the dude.

Cut to Renya going to see Moloch who is actually all better now, though he’s been feigning that he’s crippled still and hooked on pain killers. The time is drawing closer to strike since Moloch can’t put up this charade much longer and even if he could Jaxxon is in a hurry to get rid of him anyway. Renya reassure him that they got a support system to take power since some of the men are still loyal and she’s recruited Bowker to help.

Moloch is a little hesitant to trust this is a good idea given that they left him behind, but since they don’t have much in the way of options and Bowker does have knowledge of exactly why Deake is important, Moloch goes along with the plan.

Cut back to Bowker and Vamp who are in some run down motel nearby. She’s wondering what they’re doing here and Bowker explains that it’s the best way to make them think they’re with the plan rather than running off to go tell KZ. Vamp is finally starting to complain about this saying KZ isn’t going to be pleased if they waste too much time and don’t return soon.

Bowker cops a bit more of an attitude saying KZ can fuck himself and it’s going to take as long as it’s going to take. Vamp notices that Bowker’s getting a little braver now that he’s close to his old pals. Bowker dismisses this as he’s tired of getting fucked around by everyone.

Vamp at this point tries her usual flirty routine which finally causes him to ask why him anyway?

She explains that it’s because he’s alive and while she can’t really feel anything, she likes the pulsating sensation of flesh inside her (Aww yeah). She doesn’t quite answer his question of why him though. After all she can fuck any human (and has) but she does have a bit of a fixation on him specifically. One might just chalk this up to her perverse sense of chasing a “challenge” or maybe she really does like him for some strange reason.

Once again she says she can hop into another body if he wants. She could even hop into Renya’s body so he could fuck her for awhile, but Bowker’s like it doesn’t matter, once the body’s dead, it’s dead. She points out that he’s just being difficult since he did enjoy himself when he didn’t realize it was her.

And it’s at this point Bowker’s blows her brains out. Then he starts kicking her body and calling her names before mocking that she didn’t get the chance to hop out of the body. He then says how he’s finally free of all these fucking zombies.

Cut back to the paramilitary HQ which is the big ass apartment building where Jaxon’s staff are knocking on his door to tell him that there are a horde of zombies surrounding the city. He tells them to gather in the meeting room in a half hour since he wants to fuck Renya before handling this.

Well after some pre-fuck talking, she convinces Jaxon to let her get on top, from there it doesn’t take long for Renya to pull a knife out and kill Jaxon while she’s fucking him. She quickly calls Moloch to let him know that now is the time to strike since all the commanders are in the meeting room and Jaxon’s dead. She then calls Bowker to give a signal and he waves a lantern out the window.

From a distance KZ is watching with binoculars and mentions that he knew Bowker wouldn’t let him down. The oracle asks he’s not going to attack, and KZ says he might not need to if Bowker pulls this off then he’s betrayed the human race again and big time, he just doesn’t know it yet. Albert asks how so, and KZ just says everyone will see soon enough.

Issue 3

Alright so this one opens up with Stacy and Kirk driving presumably down south. Clarence is mentioned to be sleeping in the backseat. To get their mind off how things are so fucked up, Kirk suggests that they look at some tour guide pamphlets of tropical islands they’re supposedly going to conquer. Great idea Kirk, a better way of keeping your mind off how fucked up things is if you told Stacy to give you road head as you were driving.

Stacy points out that they’re going to have to be careful with some these islands since some of them have strange shit going on like voodoo, live sacrifice and cannibalism.

Wow, good thing Clarence wasn’t awake to hear you being RACIST Stacy.

When she mentions cannibalism however, Kirk winces a bit which causes Stacy to apologize to which he says it’s fine and that he doesn’t really think about it much.

And cut to a flashback…

Honestly it’s a bit of a pointless flashback, but cannibalism really has been ignored in this series so far so this is a good way to work it in.

To cut a long story short, it’s about Kirk when he was still in Michigan and he and another person get accidentally shot by others in John’s camp while on a scouting task. It’s claimed they mistook them for game, but even if it was a mistake, they were going to end up on the dinner table soon anyway.

Kirk’s wound isn’t as bad, but the other guy is dying. The small group is without food and so in the middle of the night they finish off the dying guy (Before he can zombify) and cut off his head (So he really doesn’t zombify) and eat him.

Kirk and one other old man see this and are already taking steps to escape. A shoot out ensues. The old man dies, two of the cannibals die and it’s just down to the last one and Kirk. Fortunately for Kirk that’s when another group from John’s camp finds them and shoots the cannibal.

Cut back to “present day” and Stacy is asking if they remembered all the supplies they’ll need, including condoms since she doesn’t want ANOTHER unwanted pregnancy. Kirk said he didn’t since that seemed a bit too “forward.”

REALLY Kirk? Fucking hell.

Fortunately for Kirk, Stacy’s like she’s gotta get fucked and they don’t have time for all the niceties of an old school courtship so she remembered to bring condoms. Page fucking ends with a dumb fucking grin on Kirk’s dumb fucking face.

Oh spoiler alert. (Lol) That’s it for these two. (And Clarence who doesn’t even get a final scene!) I semi-skimmed ahead through this series and they don’t show up again at all from what I can tell. You can either imagine they lived happily ever after in the Caribbean or they all got fucking eaten by zombies trying to pursue their retarded plan.

I know which ending I pick for them and nothing of value was lost.

Speaking of nothing of value, let’s catch up with Amy.

So Amy’s floating around looking for a body and she sense one close by that’s on the verge of death.

Now cut to potentially the second darkest scene in the series.

No seriously, the next scene is some fat bald dude angrily choking the shit out of a little girl and ranting about how he killed her dad so it could just be him and her together, but she just HAD to keep screaming a ruin everything! (Her dad’s body is nearby with a hole in his head)

The Reddit Moderator then goes on about how she’s the same as all the others pretending to be innocent and then resisting so he’s MADE to do this. Then it shows him standing over her dead body and undoing his pants.

Next panel is him touching her leg saying how smooth and virginal it is and thanks her for saving it for his touch as he starts lifting her dress up.

Yeah, it’s pretty fucking creepy.

However Amy saves the day by taking over the corpse while his sweaty pedo ass is on top of her going “So pure…so innocent…”

The corpse gets up and surprises the hell out of him. Why though? Surely he knows damn well the dead walk nowadays hence why he’s able to do this type of shit without . Hell, one would think that if he’s done this sort of thing multiple times as he implies, he’d have this down to a science like tying up the dead loli before fucking it. Anyway, Amy says they should have a heart to heart before taking their relationship any farther and then rips his heart out.

Cut to Bowker killing someone that’s guarding Moloch. He comes in the room to find Moloch and Renya waiting and asks where’s the rest of the resistance and they tell him this is it. Moloch tries to reassure Bowker though that all they gotta do is have the balls to act like they’re in charge and it’ll be true.

Well not like they got much else to work with now, so they barge into the meeting room where all of Jaxon’s commanders are and naturally they’re wondering what the hell is going on. Moloch says Jaxon’s dead and he’s in charge now because he’s the best one equipped to lead them into the future (And deal with the zombie army amassed outside the city)

While they send a guy to confirm Jaxon is dead, one commander in particular doesn’t see why they should follow him. Moloch starts talking about nation building and how it’ll be glorious. That same commander says Moloch has some good ideas and he’ll be sure to use them and it’s too bad he won’t be around to see them put into action while pointing a gun at Moloch.

Meanwhile KZ is still waiting outside the city and getting annoyed that Bowker hasn’t given another signal. Albert says maybe he changed his mind or he couldn’t pull off the plan. KZ kicks Albert around telling him to shut up while stating that Bowker fucked up and he’s sick of dealing with human scum. He’s going to just do it his way and orders the zombie horde to attack the city. Kill everything.

Albert tries to run away, but a graken stops him and brings him before KZ. Albert says KZ is going to kill him anyway, but he’s then reminded that he has to write KZ’s chronicles.

“Your chronicles? About what? About how you’re trying to kill every human on the planet?” - Albert
“That’s a good start. Why did you have a different approach?” -KZ

Albert finally asks who is going to read the book if everyone’s dead. KZ says he’s not sure yet, BUT he figures he’ll be prepared as it will be his legacy.

And Albert’s legacy is that he’ll be the very last human. (Albert haz a sad about this legacy)

Cut to the biker camp where Clay is telling Donna to stop whimpering over Dan since he’s dead. Joey suddenly tries to get tough, which Clay dares him to do something since he’s just looking for an excuse.

Donna stops things before they get worse, and Joey just storms off saying he wishes he never saw Donna and that he should have left with Dan. While Donna’s begging Clay not to kill Joey, more of his crew show up and tell him they found something.

Turns out what they found is Amy. One says they just found her wandering around and that there were no tracks leading back to any sort of group or family. Clay starts yelling at them asking why the hell they brought her to the camp and between Joey and now Amy, the camp is becoming a place for lost kids. Donna says she’ll look after Amy. Clay’s too pissed to even process anything just storming off saying he doesn’t need this shit.

Donna talks to Amy who is silent until she mentions that her name is Amy. Donna says she’ll take her to get some food and that’s when Amy suddenly senses that her physical half is right here in the camp. All she has to do is figure out which human it is and then it’ll be time for the world to die.

Alright on to issue 4 which has fucking Wolverine on the cover standing on a bunch of zombie bodies. It really was a different time where you could have dude with a swastika on his forehead and using the name of a popular Marvel character on the front cover of your comic. Just fuck the establishment.

So back to Moloch’s attempted coup which isn’t going very well. The black commander he’s talking to isn’t just rolling over and is about to shoot Moloch until another commander runs in saying how there’s zombies about to overrun the city. Black commander takes charge of the situation telling everyone what to do and how to do it. One guy refuses so he shoots him as an example asking if anyone else has any objections.

Everyone complies and they ask what to do about Moloch, Bowker and Renya. He says to kill them, but then says “Wait, leave the girl alive.”

Then dumb luck personified happens and the three of them get saved by Punk, Eddie and Wolverine. Even Bowker’s like he can’t believe he’s being saved by these two imbeciles. Bowker punches out the black commander and is about to kill him, but Moloch stops him saying that he handled himself well under pressure, he just wasn’t on their side. If that changes, he could use a man like him.

Black commander says yeah the pressure of command was getting to him anyway and that he was with Moloch.

While I sort of get Moloch’s logic here, I’d go more with Bowker’s approach of just killing him so he won’t be a potential threat in the future.

Moloch tells Bowker that he heard he had some sort of plan to stop the zombies so he better get to it, Bowker leaves. Moloch then tells Punk and Eddie he’s proud of them and to lock up the rest of the commanders then go out and help fight zombies.

Finally he addresses the black commander saying he could use a second then he sees Renya still there and says third in command and that he would be good for the job. Renya mentions that she promised that position to Bowker. Moloch says Bowker has no imagination, but they can keep him pacified so he still plays along.

Next up is some zombie fighting. mostly some bumbling humans fumbling with Molotovs and one of the fucktard’s actually setting himself on fire.

Cut to KZ observing the battle and asking Albert if he thinks the humans will give up. The oracle says zombies are taking heavy losses, but there’s more where that came from. Just as the humans are falling back, Bowker arrives before KZ to his surprise.

Bowker asks why the hell he’s attacking the city when they had a deal. KZ simply says he got tired of waiting. He also asks where the Vamp is and Bowker is vague about his answer, but the main thing is he says KZ has one shot at this deal and presents Deake in tow.

He says he doesn’t know why Deake is important, but he’ll kill him if KZ doesn’t call off the attack. He says take Deake and never return to the city again. That’s it.

The oracle connects with Deake and has an “interesting” experience causing Bowker to ask what the hell is going on, KZ says he thinks the oracle just had an orgasm. Cue the oracle grabbing KZ’s cigarette and taking puff saying he never had physical contact with a gate opener before.

“Our auras meshed. It was beautiful.” - Oracle

KZ says it’s a deal, but the zombies were expecting a feast and they’ll be disappointed. Bowker has Punk and Eddie offer up the other captured commanders. KZ says it’s not enough, then Bowker mentions that there’s a motor cycle camp a few miles away which should be enough. He says they’re looters anyway, if the zombies don’t take care of them, they’ll just have to later.

Cut to Amy who has finally located the physical half she needs and all she needs to do is touch it. Apparently it’s Joey.

Amy is about to touch Joey on the back of his head, but then she’s grabbed by Donna who says something’s happening and everyone needs to gather to the center of camp. Someone in camp has noticed a horde of zombies approaching. Clay does a little preparation and to keep the bikes nearby just in case they have to make a getaway. (And an off hand remark about tough for anyone who won’t be able to make it to the limited amount of bikes)

Cut back to KZ planning the attack on the camp and saying they need at least one of the humans alive for the live sacrifice. Albert asks what if the zombies accidentally kill everyone.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to use you, won’t we.” - KZ

Alright on to issue 5.

Once again the comic goes with a gimmicky cover. I won’t even bother explaining, I’ll just show you this one since I don’t remember ever really seeing on like this before by any other comic.

Now flip the cover open…

The whole portrait!

And also a great way of ripping the front of your comic cover since there’s a big square sized hole making it somewhat fragile to open and that makes a tear in that lower right corner very likely (And even if you can’t tell in the pic, mine is ripped on that corner and I used clear tape on it. F)

Okay so the zombie attack on the camp is in motion with KZ just laughing about how the humans are just hunkering down since they believe the zombies are only attacking from one side as opposed to surrounding the entire camp like he’s commanded them to.

Doesn’t take long before the bikers go from being arrogant to shitting their pants realizing that they’re fucked on all sides.

KZ sees that the group is nearly destroyed so he makes his way to shut down the show completely. Then the oracle expresses excitement that the Boss is in the camp. Not just his physical aspect, but his spiritual one as well. Just that they’re still disconnected. The oracle advises him to call off the attack, but KZ says if he’s so powerful he can look after himself.

In the ensuing chaos, people from the camp are scattering and Amy sees an opportunity to bad touch Joey. But once again Donna picks her up and shouts that they all need to make a run for it. Joey grabs Percy telling him to follow them. Donna then realizes she’s still a woman and will never be as physically strong as a man and shouts that Amy’s too fucking heavy and tells Joey to carry her.

Amy literally death hugs Joey, but nothing happens. Joey’s just carrying her as they run away from the camp. Even Amy looks confused by this. Joey catches sight of Clay trying to escape on his bike and decides he’s going to get a little revenge. He tells Percy to hold Amy and hands her off to him so he can shoot Clay.

And that’s when the transference takes place. Amy reunites with the physical aspect which was Percy all along. (Apparently her radar was a little off)

“I HAVE RETURNED!” - The Boss

There’s a mixture of reactions from the ones witness to this. Surprise, despair, excitement, etc.

Cut to Moloch giving orders to his staff which consists of Renya, Hendricks (The black commander) and Punk and Eddie (Lol) It also consists of Bowker, but Bowker is always a bit more on the frontlines so he’s already taking care of the shit he’s supposed to be doing, which is establishing order in the city via a police force, clearing up dead bodies and such.

A couple of the drafted are clearing up bodies and mumbling about not liking this new regime change and one of the dead bodies isn’t quite dead yet and you see a wispy enter it. While Bowker’s scolding them for something, the body sneaks away. Turns out this is Vamp who nearly didn’t make it. She does an inner monologue as she watches Bowker from afar saying she could have been anything he wanted so why’d he do it. She then claims she’ll be coming back for him. (She can’t obviously right now, she’s in a male body and she identifies as female lol)

Another spoiler, this is like the last time you see Moloch, Renya or that new Hendricks guy despite it looking like they were going to do more with him. I don’t even think they’re referenced again, but I suppose it can be assumed they’re running boring day to day operations of the city and nation building.

There’s more I could say about all this, but I’ll go into some of this extra stuff probably next post to take a break from the actual comic review.

Cut back to the biker camp where KZ is going on about how great this day has turned out, especially since now he also gets his pick of a new bike. He offers the survivors he’s got to volunteer to be the live sacrifice to open the gate. Since nobody volunteers, KZ just does the “eeny meeny miney moe” routine and Joey gets picked.

Then he stops and says “Wait a minute. I know you.”

Probably having a different form of torture for Joey, he says to take the girl next to Joey, which turns out to be Nancy.

Nancy begs not to be sacrifice, but Clay continuing to be an asshole even in this circumstance, throws Nancy toward KZ saying it was a fair pick. Donna at this point gives Clay a swift kick in the balls and pushes Clay towards KZ saying to take him instead.

KZ is amused by all this and likes Donna’s style (Though he doesn’t seem to recognize her like he did Joey) and figures Clay might be a littler quieter than Nancy  during the sacrifice set up, so everyone wins. He tells Clay it won’t be so bad, he’ll just feel a little burn from the inside and then it’s over or so he’s heard.

Cut to a woman running with her kids who managed to escape from the zombie attack on the camp, she then gets surprised by who she sees.

And in panel taking up half the page, you get the closest thing to a “super hero” in the comic. Yes, it’s Dead Killer and he’s even posing like a pony tailed, one handed version of the Punisher. Bow and rifle on his back, stiletto stump, uzi in the good hand. Dressed in all black but looks like a spandex material due to it showing the outlines of how fucking RIPPED he is.

Okay, it’s a comic book and even in a setting that’s technically in the “real world” can make allowances for such things, but…

HOW THE FUCK IS HE ABLE TO EVEN USE A GODDAMN BOW?

Even the rifle I suppose is doable if he has a little tripod to snipe from a fixed position, but a fucking bow? Like he doesn’t even have the special equipment that allows for someone with one hand to even do it. A bow can’t possibly be the most efficient weapon for him in any case. Like if he’s going for silent “Badassery” having him equipped with a bunch of sharp throwing knives would make way more sense. (Especially with the one arm being freakishly strong due to over use)

Anyway she recognizes him as “The Dead Killer” and he’s like “Is that what they call me?”

(Oh come on, you had to have some idea of your fame if you’re dressing like dimestore Punisher)

He tells her where the closest village is where she can get to safety and when she turns back around, he’s gone (Just like Batman!)

Cut back to Deake doing some chanting and Clay’s burnt out husk. The gate is opened causing KZ to do the villainous “YES!” thing saying that it’s time for a new world, time for a dead world.

Boom title drop.

So first five issues and they’ve already killed off some main character from the old series, reunited others, and introduced new ones. And they’ve managed to do all this without really any fuck ups or retardation of the storyline or even shitty artwork.

Don’t worry, this doesn’t last!

>Alright on to issue 4 which has fucking Wolverine on the cover standing on a bunch of zombie bodies. It really was a different time where you could have dude with a swastika on his forehead and using the name of a popular Marvel character on the front cover of your comic. Just fuck the establishment.


Can we see this one?

Shame about Moloch and the others just disappearing from the comic, a handful of fuckups who don't even like each other running a survivor town after a ballsy coup would've been an interesting story to focus on. Maybe it doesn't even matter with the MANY other problems the comic had in production, but just picking a couple sets of characters and sticking with them and introducing new characters more organically through them would've been infinitely preferable to how fragmented this all got. Pretty sure I'm only able to follow who's who at all is because you're the one describing it and there's no ever shifting art to deal with.

Glad that Dan is dead, what a moron.

Here you go.

Just missing graken tits on the cover to complete the edgelord trifecta.

Now of course the swastika is backwards, but that shit really doesn't matter since just looking at the guy, we all know what it's symbolizing. (And it ain't Shiva or the extra arms of Vishnu)

If anything, it's realistic that Wolverine has a backwards one on his head since he probably put it on himself in a fucking mirror like a fucktard.

Realm of the Dead (And a greater universe)

Before we move on to the next 5 comics, I’ll just briefly mention some more background shit.

So during this second life of Deadworld, Caliber comics was doing a bunch of re-organizing. Something they always seemed to be doing really despite all their promises that their comics would be out on time among other things.

They also had a bunch of other comics they were putting out and of course like with any product, some are going to do better than others. As I already mentioned, one common tactic was to shove in a short preview of a new comic into an older more popular one. Deadworld was always getting this treatment and it was fucking annoying since I didn’t give a shit about their other fucking comics and the short previews were just taking up space.

This was an ongoing thing at this point, but one idea they had was to start connecting their comics to a greater universe type thing. One example of this is Realm of the Dead.

Now when Caliber first bought some of Arrow’s comics, besides Deadworld, another flagship comic was “The Realm.” It was about some teenagers from earth that get transported into a fantasy world and they get to live out all their nerdy D&D shit for realsies. Sort of like a more violent version of the old D&D saturday morning cartoon I guess.

I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole “Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” scenarios, so I never bought it or read it. But Realm of the Dead was going to be a crossover and there was even a little preview to it.

It focused on the entities in Deadworld popping up in the The Realm world due to some force called the Daemonstorm which was basically just a chaos warp type thing that unleashed evil on that world.

So the little oracle dudes pop up, as do the evil wispy spirits that find host bodies to command the dead. The oracles really like this place since it’s overflowing with magic shit, but due to that, it makes things even harder for them to sense a gate opener to open the gate from their home to this world on a more permanent basis.

They also sense humans in this world and that won’t do at all.

Fortunately grakens also show up so that’s extra help, and the oracles wait for the three wispies to come back so they can get to the dead raising already.

The three wispies return in their new bodies. One looks like a traditional fantasy necromancer complete with the hooded robe. (It’s a classic) The second one looks like it’s some dead chick in plate armor. Probably a death knight type thing. And the third is a giant pig monster. Probably The Realm’s version of an orc/ogre. They start chanting and…nothing happens.

The hooded robe one then shouts that something else is controlling all the dead here.

And the little preview ends there in the hopes that it was enough for you to go buy the mini-series planned.

Again since I never got into the Realm, I didn’t bother buying this 4 comic mini-series. Probably one of the few Deadworld related things I actually didn’t buy since I’m fairly certain I own most of the stuff related to it.

Caliber later did other crossover attempts with other comics they published (One was actually called “Daemonstorm” and linked like 4 worlds, Deadworld included) but there never seemed to be too much appeal.

>>You’re writing a letter to a fucking comic book. You’ll never be cool.

I think this is my favorite line out of the several posts and many thousands of words I just read.

Although the guy sending in hand drawn self insert gay zombie porn and the guy pretending to be a girl are treasures too. Very interesting that the internet existed in letters to the editors before it existed properly.

Speaking of the letters, if they were still printing those I'm sure that Aaron guy would have had something to say about KZ since he actually is sporting an upside down cross earring in one ear now or at least he is in some issues.

As usual it's a bit inconsistent, but I'm sure it was one of the artists with a long term memory that decide to troll a bit.

Deadworld (History repeats itself)

Alright issue 6 (Which has yet another simplistic cover of all read with a weird (and presumably demonic) symbol embossed in gold on the front.

You get a lot panels of the gate opening, along with some creatures pouring in. KZ’s pretty happy, Deake’s looking despondent.

Joey’s dumbass tries to talk to Percy like he’s actually still in that body, even going so far to say “I’m your friend, remember?”

Once again: This little shit didn’t even like Percy! Ever!

Percy/Boss grabs Joey and Donna tries to stop him from killing Joey and it’s at this point the Boss just transforms into his true form and that’s the last you see of Percy in any capacity.

Since the Boss is doing his transformation bit, Donna and the rest decide this would be a good time to get the hell out of there. Albert’s around, but he tells them to run off without him since he’s going to make sure the evil being bunch don’t notice they’re letting warmies get away. (Plus he’s sort of stuck with KZ anyway, so running is pointless for him)

So we got Donna, Joey, oh and Nancy! They’re both carrying Joey since he’s all tuckered out from getting neatly choked out by the Boss. Nancy is whining as usual that she can’t do this and can’t they just leave Joey behind. (Well she does have a good idea) Donna however is insistent that nobody get left behind.

KZ is giving some words of encouragement to Deake to keep the gate open or he’ll be skinned alive. Deake’s doing the best he can, but now he’s whining about how much this hurts. The Boss doesn’t care though he needs MOAR, so Deake better bite the pillow because this is going to take awhile.

Donna and the rest get far enough to stop for a moment mainly due to Nancy being a low endurance bitch. You would have thought all that gang rape would have increased that stat. (Certainly helped Donna) Joey opens his eyes and get enough strength to say they have to go back. Donna wants to just get away, but Joey points out that if they open that gate permanently then it really is all over. Donna decides that’s probably true even if she doesn’t want to go back.

Nancy REALLY doesn’t want to go back, but she’s interrupted by…

DEAD KILLER who shows up saying fighting the zombies is the only thing to do.

Donna asks who he is, and he says it doesn’t matter, but Nancy sees the iconic metal stump and recognizes him as DEAD KILLER.

In any case, Dead Killer is told they’re opening up a gate to another world so that’s where he’s heading. Joey says they’re coming too, which DK says fine, but not to get in his way. He also hands Joey and Donna some guns since he’s basically a nameless RPG protagonist with no background that can just carry a shitload of stuff with no weight limit. Amusingly Nancy doesn’t get shit.

Joey and DK briefly talk about intelligent zombies both saying they’ve run into KZ before, but of course DK having to one up Joey and say he’s actually KILLED KZ once and that’s why he’s a leveled up super chad while Joey’s still lowly scrub despite being in the series since the first fucking comic.

KZ remarks about how beautiful the gate to the other world is and how Albert hasn’t even seen anything yet. Then some demon dog type creatures come out, one of the which KZ assigns to Albert as a “pet”

DK is setting up from afar to snipe KZ, but Joey and Donna both tell him not to bother and to snipe Deake instead. DK doesn’t know who the fuck that is, so they tell him he’s the one opening the gate so if he’s killed, at least there’s still a chance the world won’t be completely horse fucked. It takes a bit of convincing since DK REALLY wants to kill KZ again, but he instead snipes Deake.

You get spectacular side shot of Deake getting his brain blown out.

It’s funny, Deake in the scheme of things is/was a pretty important character as far as the plotline, but he was mostly relegated to the background. Granted you got his back story pretty early in the series, but he never does too much else except being hauled around as a prisoner most of the time.

Anyway, DK tries to shoot KZ next, but he misses since he’s still a one stump chump and it doesn’t take long before the new hell hounds are running at the group.

Well predictably Nancy falls while running and gets her useless ass eaten by a hell hound. The rest of the group take the opportunity to fill it full of lead while it’s preoccupied with her. It doesn’t like that though and nearly kills DK (Who still isn’t even fully healed from his legs getting smashed to shit in that mini-series) Joey and Donna manage to help him out, downing the creature. The three of them take off though while yet another hell hound is busily eating Nancy’s body.

Cut to KZ cursing and kicking Deake’s corpse saying why the fuck he couldn’t have stayed alive just a little bit longer. He then throws his body to some zombies. Albert is writing in his book causing KZ to ask what the fuck he’s doing. Albert says he’s recording what happened, after all that’s what KZ wanted him to do.

KZ yells at him that he doesn’t want this shit written about since it’s bad enough he’s probably going to get blamed for all this so he certainly doesn’t want anyone to read about it.

“You write what I tell you, you hear me? I don’t need this negative press!” - KZ

Albert points out that it really wasn’t KZ’s fault though. KZ says yeah he knows that, but the Boss is going to blame him anyway. Albert says he’ll write that it wasn’t his fault so everyone will know, which seems to calm KZ down.

Actually Albert being KZ’s human scribe was probably the best thing they could have done with his character.

So a skeletal horse shows up to interrupt this conversation causing KZ to state that things are better than he thought since apparently enough energy came through the gate to bring back everything that ever died on the planet back to life.

Cut back to DK and the rest where they’re arriving to presumably that small town he was looking over in the mini-series which seems to be a lot better fortified now. They stop at the town’s clinic where his girlfriend is working (We finally find out her name is Katherine). She asks him how his legs are and he says they’re fine, he asks how their recent patient is, to which Katherine says he seems to be recovering thanks to be strong.

Donna asks what happened to him, Katherine says they found him on a trail and it looked like he crawled for miles. Donna takes a closer look and to her shock it’s Dan!

(I know that’s going to disappoint Mizal, I wasn’t aware she hated his character though)

I sort of left out some passing comment that Clay makes when his biker buddies found Amy in the woods, he asks “Did you find his body?” to which they say nah, zombies must have got it.

That was probably the clue that Dan wasn’t dead, since they did that with him before with the riverboat incident.

My question is how the fuck did Clay NOT kill Dan at the range he had. Like you see him pointing a pistol straight at his prone body.

And even if you take the premise that Clay just shot Dan in the body rather than blowing his brains out (Like he would have) and walked away believing he killed him when it was really just a “flash wound”, why the hell would have Clay asked if they found his body? Wouldn’t he believe he’d already killed him?

Yeah, it’s a bullshit plot armor to keep Dan around since technically he was the OG “favorite” character, but they sort of have DK to fill that role of “badass” now. And as one dimensional as DK is, he’s overpowered to the point where he does that job way better than Dan ever could.

Well anyway, on to issue 7 which has a graken tearing what is probably a child apart (Based on the doll in hand) but since Caliber always wants to keep things family friendly, they tastefully have one of the graken’s arms blocking her tits.

So this comic has one of those long winded Deaditorials on the inside of the cover, which pretty much tells you that things are going to start sucking with the series. This one is a little different however in that they’re not making their usual excuses of sucking, instead they’re patting themselves on the back about how their comic is on time and all the upcoming comics that are going to be out soon. (Lol, no they won’t, but more on that later)

So it opens with KZ with a bunch of little flying imps around him and calling Albert over for something important. He’s got a question that only he can answer and he better get it right. And that question is…

“What’s the name of the seven dwarfs?” - KZ
“What?” - Albert
“You know, Snow White! What’s the name of the seven midgets that dreamed of gang banging her?” -KZ

Albert nervously starts rattling off their names until he gets to Happy at which point KZ says that’s the one and then turns to the imps and says

“You’re Happy. Now all of you have names and you better not forget them!” - KZ

He then tells Albert’s he can keep on living for at least another day. Albert falls into despair of his situation again and thinks about escape, but then that Hell Hound that’s attached himself to him lumbers by reminding him of that impossibility. So can angrily writes in his journal again about his shitty situation and even mentions how he sees Stacy in his daydreams since he’s still simping for her even though she’s not even in the fucking comic anymore.

Oh, now would be a good time to mention that it’s back to ever shifting fucking artwork in the comic again and just like before, some of it is pretty fucking terrible, like the next scene with Dan and Donna.

Okay, so these two are finally reunited (Again) but it’s not like the first time they reunited and Donna jumped in his arms with her legs wrapped around him.

Dan gives a half ass explanation of guessing Clay left him to bleed out so the zombies would get him. Yeah still not buying that Clay would have bothered doing that but whatever, Dan’s bitching that Donna didn’t try very hard to stop Clay and now he’s hearing weird voices in his head.

He says to Donna that it sounds like someone calling him and that he’s had this experience before. He then makes a snide comment of how he used to think it was Donna, but she doesn’t seem to give him much thought at all anymore.

Donna rightfully gets pissed since he’s starting a fight for no damn good reason, and mentions HE was the one that left her behind and that the voice is probably one of his other girlfriends.

Dan immediately backtracks saying he really didn’t mean to leave her and asks if she did call for him.

“Every night Dan. Every night.” - Donna

Lol, I bet he feels like a fucktard for starting an argument now.

So Donna leaves and runs into Katherine and the pair of them have “girltalk” about their boyfriends! While Donna’s still not sure what’s going to happen with her and Dan, let alone life in general given that the world has gone to shit.

Katherine however all upbeat and optimistic about things. (Well yeah of course she is, she’s got the sigma grindset boyfriend.) She mentions how Donna can’t give up hope and how DK taught her a lot of things. Donna says he seems really intense and scary as the pair of them watch DK talking with Joey.

DK is teaching Joey how to use a bow since it’s not like he can use the damn thing despite carrying it around. Sort of like what you do when you’re playing a RPG and find some good loot, but you can’t use it so you give it to a follower who can.

After expressing how much Joey sucks with a bow, it’s mentioned that Katherine used to be a doctor. When it’s asked what DK was before all this shit happened, he says it’s not important and for Joey to NOT ask again.

Cut to some scene with a young couple making out by some bushes. The girl is reluctant to give it up, while the guy expresses that it’s not just about the sex and that he really loves her.

Well I think we’ve all scene enough horror movies to know how this one’s going to end.

Cue the Vamp in her burned up corpse shell coming across them both. She kills the dude and then has to chase down the girl who not only takes off running, but ends up tripping like a horror movie stereotype. The vamp even does the meta thing of saying how she used to think B-movies were silly because the girls always inevitably tripped when being chased by the monster.

She drowns the girl in a convenient nearby stream, then kills her old body so she can enter the new one which she realizes also happens to be a virgin.

“How can Bowker possibly resist?” - Vamp

And that’s actually it for the main storyline. Seriously, it’s short as fuck.

Oh wait, there is more. And no it’s not even a side story set in the same universe. The story actually involves Dan, but for whatever fucking reason, they decided to make it, it’s own side story. It’s called “The Call”

Okay, so this is where shit just starts fragmenting badly again. I almost don’t even want to bother going into this thing because all it really is, is just a drawn summary of all the events that occurred to Dan since the first issue.

But let’s do this anyway…

So the entire tale is Dan having an inner monologue with himself as he’s stumbling around in the wilderness after hearing this “Call.”

Goes on about how he felt about various things, from the OG crew all the way to when Clay shot him.

About the only new shit you sort of see is some missing “blanks” like for example of what he was doing from the time he got punched by KZ off the riverboat to the time when he rescues the OG group the first time around. But the whole thing is just a long winded retelling of old events.

Eventually he gets to the spot that he’s being called to and he meets some young bald black woman who apparently called him there. Dan doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, but voodoo girl tell him that he doesn’t need to worry about it yet because he’s meant to be there and THEY are destined to be together. She tells him not to fight and kisses him.

So Dan being Dan, doesn’t resist her.

And that’s about it.

There’s going to soon be a weird arc with Dan in general. I’m pretty sure this whole thing was a way to try to keep Dan relevant since like I mentioned before, his “badass” spot is now inhabited by DK.

Alright issue 8 which sets off a series of Gigeresque covers for the next few issues.

Starts out with KZ showing Albert his new home which is a cave. He says he’ll bring some furniture and torches later so he can keep writing. In the meantime he’s investigating the half assed gate that’s still around since there’s still stuff coming out of it despite not being fully opened.

Albert tries to leave the cave, but the hell hound prevents him from leaving. Worse, he discovers the Boss is deeper within the cave, but he seems like he’s in some sort of trance.

Cut to Joey and DK who are killing zombies with a bow and arrow. And it’s here that we see how it’s possible DK is using a bow with one hand. He’s got like a crease in the metal stump to hold on to the bow while his actual hand pulls it back. I swear this stump can just do anything the comic calls for.

Anyway, Joey’s terrible at it and just doesn’t see why they can’t shoot the zombies with a machine gun and proceeds to do just that, which pisses off DK since it’s a waste of ammo (and draws attention) DK then says they have to get supplies at a small village nearby which is six miles causing Joey to whine about how far that is. He also goes on about DK being cautious about everything.

Jesus fucking Christ.

As annoying as Joey was when he was a kid, he’s now a whiny bitch on top of it. Seriously, this kid has grown up through the zombie apocalypse at this point. Even with the short stay at the other community that was trying to pretend everything was normal, walking six miles and intelligently killing zombies should be things he’s used to by now. Apparently he’s learned nothing, but then again that explains why he wanted to just walk into the biker camp and stay there.

So this village has some basic defenses like a guard tower and barbwire fence around it, but both aren’t excessively useful given that they barely have any guards and the ones they do have are sleeping. DK wakes one up and arranges a delivery of more ammo for his town in exchange for information on the current situation of the outside world along with some livestock for food.

While DK’s using his bartering skills, Joey thinks this is a dating sim and starts talking to some chick that’s there who is excitedly telling him about how they have a generator that keeps their Nuka Cola nice and cold.

So they start talking and because Joey is an addict he drinks like five of the fucking things which must impress this chick because she wants a kiss before he leaves. When Joey kisses her like she was his cousin, she tells him to kiss her like she’s his sister instead. So Joey complies and she’s already telling him to squeeze her tits hard and half way leading him to a bed when DK’s calling for Joey since he’s finished all his barter skill checks.

DK is finishing up warning their leader to remember to cut off the heads of the animals when killing them since they all zombify too now. As they’re leaving Joey asks why they’re getting more ammo since they have enough at home (Which is sort of a dumb question) DK explains that he just wants to prep in case this community decides one day to not want to trade anymore and instead just take shit. Joey asks why the two communities haven’t just teamed up, but DK says none of them want to leave the area and it’s a shit location if the zombies ever attacked in a horde, while DK’s town is better fortified.

Also some of DK’s community were against it because the other folks are… lepers.

Cue to Joey’s cringe face.

Whoops!

Cut back to KZ who is talking to his undead horse saying it was getting harder to find gas for his bike anyway. He’s approaching the gate and then he sees three godlike beings in almost like a portrait style pose. (And the gate acting as the picture frame) One of them is this jawless skeletal figure with a crown. Another is just a grinning shadow mass and the last one (Towering in back center) doesn’t look at all like a god that would fit with the dead/chaos/evil theme and looks more like some god of order or the sun maybe. Actually now that I’m thinking about it. Looks a bit like the Lady of Pain from Planescape.

In any case that’s it. The main comic ends right there. Seriously 14 fucking pages front and back and some of those were one fucking panel (Like the page I just mentioned) or large panels of zombie killing and no dialog.

Well no wonder the fucking comics are on time now, they’re barely writing anything.

Oh alright, the comic isn’t completely over. They have not one but TWO separate short stories in the same world.

The first called Body of Art really could have just been within the main storyline since it involves the Vamp. It begins with her going into a tattoo shop telling some old tattooist that she’s tired of waiting and wants to get the work done that they talked about before.

It goes into the old man’s story of how he’s dedicated his life to this art and would never leave his shop even after his wife and everyone else died in town. The Vamp goes back and forth between threatening the old man to going on about which tattoos Bowker liked and complaining about their toxic one sided relationship.

However she’s hopeful that he’ll change his mind with this new body, but still remember it’s her due to the tattoos. (Or at least hoping to get another stealth rape out of it)

After it’s finished the old man has a pistol and was going to shoot her, which disappoints the Vamp, but he says he can’t since she’s the best work he’s ever done. Expecting to die and finally join his wife, the Vamp just kisses him saying the world will miss his talents, but when the world finally dies, she’ll be his testimony.

And she just leaves letting the old man live.

The second story Oliver Twisted is some boy dressed like a 18th century orphan in a cage yelling for help. Some military guy hears him and says it must have been one of the brainy zombies that put him in there.

He gets the cage open only for the boy to shoot him and then calls out zombies to finish the job which are all children. In walks an adult zombie dressed like some 18th century school master (Him and “Oliver” are the only ones dressed like this, the other zombie kids are dressed in more “modern” clothing) saying here’s the boy’s reward and tosses a soup can at him.

As the zombies eat, Oliver asks Mr. Treacle (The zombie school master) if he’d finally let him become a zombie since he’s getting older and his voice is changing. He isn’t sure how long he can keep up the act. But Mr. Treacle ignores him saying that nobody can replace his “Prince of Poachers” and it’s impolite to discuss business over dinner.

He then chops off the dead guy’s leg asking who wants a drumstick.

And that’s it for the entire issue. Rest of it is fucking advertisements for their other comics

Issue 9

This one starts off again with Albert in his cave and scared that the Boss is going to kill him, but then some voice says he’s not going to do shit. He can’t hear or see shit and doesn’t even know Albert (or anyone) is there.

Eventually the source of this voice makes himself known and it’s someone in a hooded robe saying he’s a friend and to follow him. Albert’s a little reluctant and asks what about the Boss to which the hooded figure says he’s been catatonic for days and he suspects he was unable to restore himself properly due to the gate closing too soon.

He goes on to say his group was about to attack before the gate could open all the way until they saw it would be unnecessary. (Way to wait until the last fucking minute, the gate was damn near opened before Deake got killed.) Albert then follows him deeper into the cave.

Cut to Joey wanting to talk to Katherine asking her about doctor stuff like what kind she was and if she knows anything about diseases. Katherine immediately gets pissed thinking Joey went and got himself a STD because she doesn’t have that much penicillin left and now she has to waste it. Joey immediately states it’s nothing like that and was just wondering about leprosy and if you can catch it by touching someone.

Katherine already knows where this is going and figures DK took him to the leper colony. She states that the form of leprosy that some of the people have there was actually injected into them and it doesn’t occur naturally. It also isn’t contagious.

She also says that Darcy doesn’t have it anyway, knowing damn well that was probably who he was groping. She then says that he should STILL keep protection in mind. She then runs into Donna who has just come out of the infirmary and she’s crying about Dan being gone.

Cut to Bowker back in the city where he’s receiving a report from someone called Holzinger explaining the current situation of incorporating another small town that decided it would be a good idea to join the alliance to receive better protection. In exchange they helpfully gave some supplies. This report is illustrated with what’s really going on and that’s basically Bowker’s men just strong arming weak towns for supplies.

However the further report states that ANOTHER group came into the same town that Bowker’s people were “protecting” and just wiped the whole place out. Everything was done quickly and with precision. The group calls themselves the Scavengers and they’ve done this before so Bowker wants to be kept updated. Meanwhile Vampy is watching Bowker from a distance with binoculars stating he’s either going to be hers or dead or both.

Cut back to Albert and robe dude who have gone from the simple cave to a full blown cavern system. It’s mentioned they’ve mapped about 20-25 miles, but they don’t really know how big it is. Eventually they get to a big ass cavern with a sizable settlement. Albert asks who the hell are they to which robe dude just says all will soon be explained.

It was really lucky that Albert just happened to get put into a cave which linked to some secret group that has been hiding from the zombie apocalypse the entire time.

Cut to Punk and Eddie who are up to their usual antics of goofing off while they’re supposed to be scouting for the Scavengers for Bowker (Guess Moloch demoted them when he realized they didn’t deserve to be on the fucking “high council” in the first place)

Punk is taking a shit and trying to figure out what isn’t poison ivy when zombies attack. He’s lucky however that Wolverine… er I mean “Wolvie” (Guess they decided to change the name just to be safe, still got the swastika though) was sleeping in the back of their jeep and he takes care of all the zombies himself while Punk and Eddie decide that the problem is solved.

Next scene is DK, Joey, Donna, Katherine and some others heading to Brunson. DK is going on one of his long winded Batman tirades about being prepared and to never let your guard down. He’s doing this with a visual example. A group of humans in the distance have allowed themselves to get completely surrounded by zombies and DK’s telling them all to watch as they desperately fight while they get taken down one by one until the last two hug and kill themselves.

While I get that DK’s being his usual grimdark self, I feel like most of this group has already experienced worse than zombies at this point that this lesson doesn’t really need to be hammered home. Maybe it’s for the no name characters though.

He then says he and Joey will look for Dan when they reach Brunson while Katherine and the others administer medical help and rest. Donna wants to go search for Dan, but DK doesn’t want her to and says if she doesn’t fall in line she can just fucking leave. She gets pissed, but Katherine tells her to just calm down since he knows what he’s doing.

“Nobody’s always right.” - Donna

In Donna’s defense, she’s probably just as useful as Joey at this point.

Finally cut back to KZ (Who always seems to have the best artist working on his scenes most of the time)

He’s returning to the cave mentioning that he’s got some new friends that have given him something that the Boss couldn’t or wouldn’t. If he ever gets out of the coma, maybe he’ll tell him about it. He then tells the little imps to go find where Albert went in the caves. The oracle asks KZ what’s the Boss’ status to which KZ says the old boss doesn’t matter anymore and to say hello to the NEW boss.

Alright issue fucking 10

And now we finally get to this voodoo mumbo jumbo again. Voodoo girl is chanting and telling Dan that even though he doesn’t understand shit yet, he soon will. She says something about him not belonging in the land of the living or the dead. I dunno, it’s retarded.

In any case she starts raising the dead and controlling them. She then goes on about her old gods and how nobody understands them and how science doesn’t understand death either. Then she makes out with some female zombie (Hawt) and rips out her heart to make a point about something being a symbol and gives it to Dan to eat since she wants him to join in the celebration of life and death of the group spirit. And hilariously he just eats the heart without saying anything.

So basically she got Dan to engage in cannibalism and group necrophilia. I dunno, it’s retarded.

Cut to Katherine and Donna doing medical examinations and shit at Brunson, or rather Katherine’s doing medical shit, Donna’s just sort of standing there watching. Katherine asks Donna if she’d like to learn rather than just being useless, but Donna’s not sure since it seems like a lot of responsibility.

Katherine then launches into this lecture about medicine, survival of the fittest, and sort of even leaning a bit into eugenics saying how the human race is overall weaker since medicine saved people that should have died and then those people had children who have weak genes. She’s not sure if the human race if going to make it.

It’s sort of an odd scene, but then I guess maybe they were going for other concerns that would crop up in a post apocalyptic scenario even without the zombies. (And probably is probably more useful than the voodoo plotline going on with Dan)

Cut to Bowker being an alpha and beating up his own men training them how to fight and all that.

Okay, so they super JACKED Bowker from how he used to look. Like he was basically an in shape dude anytime you saw him before, but they got him training without a shirt on and he looks like that wrestler Lex Luger in his prime (Not now). Hell, they even do a damn nude scene of his ass when he’s taking a shower and talking to Holzinger giving him another report about the Scavenger activity.

It’s also sort of established that he used to be special forces…although Bowker could very well be lying about that to the people he’s training.

Honestly you never really could tell if he ever had any real military background or he was just some self trained militia nut. He always came off more as the latter and just sort of embraced more military trappings when he got in charge.

Anyway, he says he’s going on the next patrol mission personally.

And of course where there’s Bowker, Vampy isn’t too far away. She manages to get into the city gates by claiming to be an entertainer and showing off her nearly naked tattooed body to the guard who probably gets his dick bitten off later.

Cut to Joey who’s back in Brunson so he goes to see Darcy and apologize for not fucking her the last time. Darcy though says she probably came on too strong and should be apologizing. In fact she’s not even sure she’d like sex since she’s never had it. She just knows that when girls give up the pussy usually guys will give them what they want and she figured Joey would take her away from Brunson.

Joey says Brunson doesn’t seem so bad, but she then launches into her life story…

Yep, this whole issue is people going into long winded speeches about everything.

Darcy’s story is probably somewhat interesting though. She mentions there used to be a science facility nearby that did secret tests, but since it employed a lot of people from town nobody asked questions. However when the zombie shit went down, this facility sent out their helmeted goons to round people up from the town in the middle of the night. She mentions that she could recognize one guy through the dark helmet who was Carlos from town.

The town got marched off to the facility and if they didn’t go they got shot. From there the town was separated into test subjects where she was lucky she and her dad were in a control group that didn’t get the tests.

She also mentions she never saw her mom and brother again which contradicts what Katherine tells Joey that only Darcy’s mother and brother have leprosy. (How would she know for sure and why would it matter, they’re dead!)

She then says one night the test subject building gets set on fire and there’s gunshots. Everyone’s running out of there towards the building she’s in and rescue everyone. Carlos is one of those guards that turned against his scientist masters which made her happy, but then Carlos gets shot in the face before the rescue is complete.

Even though some of the other test subject people never came back to town, her dad still holds out hope that her mom will return someday hence why most of the population still sticks around the town.

Joey at this point says he’s gotta go find Dan and they can talk more later. Darcy’s all excited since then they can start dating and eventually get married like good Catholic girls do. (She actually says that line)

Joey then realizes that he might not get the quick sex like he thought he was.

Doh!

Now cut to Albert talking to a bunch of these robed cave dwellers who still haven’t told him who they are exactly. When they too begin to launch into a long winded tale, they manage to avoid the damn question for the most part all the while wanting Albert to join them.

Albert once again asks who the fuck they are and one explains that they’ve been collecting Albert’s hidden journals and transcribing them since it is a chronicle of humanity. His “voice” explains the zombies, the gate, etc and it does it from a “neutral perspective” rather than other stuff they’ve found from government papers and such.

…

I dunno, it’s fucking retarded. Even Albert doesn’t get why he’s so important.

Anyway one of the robed guys uncovers his face saying he stands as a testimony of the evil humanity can do to each other. He looks like a zombie, but he’s just got a really bad case of leprosy.

Yep, this is where all the lepers from the facility went, well the really bad off ones anyway. Honestly it doesn’t even fucking sense for multiple reasons which I can’t even be bothered to get into.

But I’ll just mention the logistics is the main thing. If they’ve been lurking in these caves that are only about 20-25 miles, how the fuck did they get Albert’s journals (Nevermind finding them all. It's not like they were making a ringing noise like Nirnroot)  that he was placing randomly long before even coming anywhere near this area?

And…look like I said, that’s just the start of it all. Whatever, let’s just move on.

Another nearby dude appears and says that he is the evil that created that testimony. He just looks old, but the artwork is so shitty you still might mistake him for a leper or a zombie. Presumably he’s one of the scientists though.

Finally cut to KZ who is having issues with controlling the dead and they’re all wandering elsewhere. He mentions he’s seen this happen before and its a minor nuisance, but one he doesn’t have time to deal with so he tells a couple of the imps to go follow the zombies to see where they wander to.

The oracle says they need to find another gate keeper to restore the boss, but KZ is like fuck that, because he’s got the power now and the world is his.

And that’s it for this train wreck. Just five more issues to go.

Deadworld (The Messy End)

Issue 11

This one has the last of the Giger like covers, and also has another long ass Deaditorial explaining that the series arc is ending by issue 15 and that things are going to be wrapped up. They also say how some characters that have been around awhile are going to die and a whole bunch of other shit so stay tuned because exciting things for the series are coming… if everything goes according to plan on their end. Their actual words. So even they knew they were going to fuck up.

This one starts off with Bowker and his boys in a jeep driving around killing zombies until they stop suddenly and notice that they’ve found the Scavengers. That’s it. Moving on to the next scene.

The next stuff is back to Albert and the rotten lepers, along with one of the scientists that caused all this. So Dr. Mengele goes into why he went down the path of Unit 731.
He mentions that when the zombie shit started happened they initially were trying to figure out why this was happening through SCIENCE! Unfortunately, this didn’t pan out anything and the scientist just had to admit that there was some supernatural reason for this shit. Around this time all their communication with other scientific enclaves were cut off.

Still undeterred they decided that maybe SCIENCE could still help deal with this problem. Maybe reverse the process or something. Of course this didn’t work because…well a wizard did it and you can’t explain that shit when science didn’t apply in the first fucking place.

So instead of studying the zombies, they tried to experiment with humans because that always works. So after some tests and ignoring the moral implications for the Greater Good, they decided on infecting people with leprosy since that was the closest way to test dead flesh without actually y’know killing the person.

Well once again they didn’t learn shit. Wasn’t like Evil Dead 2 where a dead hand suddenly became zombified and attacked its human host. At this point Dr. Mengele decided that well none of this shit is working so it might be time to just give up. However, other scientists had other ideas like transplanting zombie organs into the living and vice versa to see what that did.

By the time they were at that point, the scientific method was thrown out the window and full on Dr. Frankenstein was going on.

So eventually Dr. Mengele (Or Dr. Roget as his name was revealed) decides to stop all this mad scientist shit and that’s when the facility went into civil war mode and everyone was freed.

Honestly, all this shit does sound sort of interesting, the problem of course is, it’s past info. Would have been better to see something like this actually happen IN the comic storyline. Which is probably what was planned, but a bit more on that later.

Anyway so with that background info dump out of the way, the lepers go on about forgiving Dr. Roget since he helped them escape and killing him wouldn’t change anything, then they say they’re accepting Albert into the community. Meanwhile one of KZ’s little imps has watched all this from the shadows and goes flapping off.

Cut to Joey and DK looking for Dan. They’re no having much luck, but DK insists on looking for tracks. That’s it.

Now cut back to Bowker and his scouts. They find the town where the Scavengers are and mention that it seems to be their sanctuary since they aren’t fucking up the townies that live there. Bowker says to kill all the Scavengers and just 10 of the townies to set an example. That’s it.

(I really hate these short one page jumps they do.)

Cut to KZ being told about where Albert is. He sends a couple of grakens and the few zombies still listening to him to go get Albert back and wipe out the lepers. The oracle says it might be best to wait for more zombies, but KZ is tired of waiting. He then tells a remaining graken to kill the oracle if he speaks out of turn again.

Alright, once again cut back to Bowker… seriously, they could have just put all his subplot into one long portion in the comic instead of fucking jumping around so much.

Anyway, Bowker is watching the town from afar seeing his troops mop up the scavengers remarking that they were no match for a well organized group. He then goes on to Holzinger to radio the patrol to pick ten townies and Bowker himself is going to give a warning speech before making the example.

Cut to Punk, Eddie and Wolvie also watching from afar in their goof off location. They see Bowker, wondering what he’s doing in the area and notice all the scavengers have been killed. Though when Eddie sees the townies getting shot, he decides this is a line too far and they can’t be part of this. And it’s sort of implied they just all go AWOL at that point.

Cut back to DK and Joey still fumbling around in the woods and finally finding tracks to follow back to Brunson. DK goes into protector mode and gives zero fucks about Dan…and that’s it. Once again, could have easily put their shit into one portion.

Finally cut to the cave lepers getting attacked my zombies, grakens, hell hounds and even the little imps. During this chaos one of the lepers finds Albert and says he’s going to kill him for leading them here. He didn’t of course, but it would be nice if he killed Albert anyway.

So just to address a passing remark that the leper said when talking with Albert, besides forgiving Dr. Roget, he also mentions not forgetting the horrors that were done and those that are still performing said horrible experiments. This was probably a nod to a comic that was really being hyped up called “The Slaughterhouse.”

This was going to be one of those Deadworld Chronicle tales that were going to be coming out. One shot comics telling stories within the same universe. (I’ll be getting to those after finishing these) And they REALLY hyped this one up. Like you got an ad for it at least once every comic. But once again more on The Slaughterhouse later since you do get a preview of it in the last comic.

Issue 12

And this is where they were just getting really fucking lazy towards the end because they did the upside down double comic flip again. Except this time, the other comic is The Realm (Issue 9) Guess due to the Realm of the Dead cross over they were still trying to entice a crossover audience when all it probably did was piss off readers that were only interested in one or the other.

Now you might think this one is shorter, due to a whole other comic taking up space, but it’s actually just a fat comic book and this issue is probably standard in length, so maybe they were just trying to save money on covers or something.

Starts off with the cave leper about to kill Albert getting stopped by the cave leper who brought him here in the first place. After a brief discussion of Albert not leading the hordes of chaos to the cave, the community goes to grab their weapon stash and you get a lot of panels of the lepers battling it out with the horde. Probably one of the better parts of this comic.

Cut to the boring shit with Dan and Voodoo girl. He’s still in this weird trance while she’s going on about some bullshit of reclaiming the dead and how he’s one of them now and she’s got a whole horde of some rather non decayed looking zombies. They really just look like a bunch of naked humans rather than zombies. I dunno, it’s retarded.

Cut to Joey and DK who have followed the tracks back to Brunson which is now in ruins.

So it wasn’t really clear about the town that the scavengers were hanging out in, but apparently it was Brunson the whole time. So Bowker and his boys actually just fucking looted the place. Also turned out that all the Scavengers were snot nosed kids or young teens.

DK asks Darcy’s dad why the hell did he let the scavengers stay at the town to which he said they were the kids from town that managed to sneak away before getting experimented on hence why when they learned who the scavengers were, they let them stick around sometimes. Darcy’s dad also mentions that one of them was his son.

Okay I feel like the scavenger plotline got switched up before the ending of it. I distinctly remember the scavengers being some very organized raider gang that was initially murdering Bowker’s men without problems, along with terrorizing entire towns. Like I get the idea of feral kids being dangerous, but there couldn’t have been THAT many of them even to begin with since I doubt the science facility was that lax in security. They didn’t have the breakdown until they started going full Dr. Frankenstein and it was indicated that the kids escaped before that happened.

Won’t even get into going in like a strike team to assassinate militia boys without problems. Granted not all of them are as skilled as Bowker, but still.

Anyway, DK asks where Katherine is and Darcy’s dad says they took her remarking that the leader (Bowker) saying that she wasn’t just to be a hostage. Meanwhile Joey goes to see Darcy and she’s holding her dead brother saying he finally came back only to get killed.

And here’s another inconsistency. The Brunson folks were letting these bloodthirsty brats stay at their place from time to time. How did Darcy not see her brother before? I mean it’s possible her dad told him to NOT see his sister I guess, but it’s not that big of a town, surely she would have been curious given her interest in new people showing up.

Cut back to the leper cave fight which is going badly for the lepers until suddenly the horde is called to fall back. Albert doesn’t get why they just suddenly left, but it’s a good thing they did.

Cut to KZ punching one of the grakens since he didn’t order them to fall back at all. He tells them to get back in that cave, but they don’t comply since the Boss apparently gave the order for them to fall back as he’s out of his coma now and pissed about KZ trying to usurp his position.

Cut to Joey talking to Darcy who doesn’t want him to go, but since they took Donna too he’s going with DK since he’s out of “family” now. He promises Darcy he’ll be back though. Meanwhile DK tells the surviving Brunson folks where to go where they’ll be safe which is… the leper cave.

Apparently DK knew about these diseased fuckers the WHOLE TIME.

This pisses off some of the Brunson folks since that’s one of the reasons why they stayed put, to be reunited one day, but DK goes on to say that he made a promise to NOT tell anyone about them. He’s gotta break that promise though to ensure their safety from any future attacks though (Lol) He also prepares them that they underwent even worse experiments than they did so they’re not going to be pretty to look at but they should be willing to reunite. He also tells Darcy that her mom is alive even if she’s a leper. (Now THIS explains how Katherine might have known about the mom thanks to DK letting his wall down and telling her secrets in bed, though she claimed the brother was a leper too…yeah they just fucked the consistency again)

It’s about here that I think they were trying to imply DK was somehow connected with the Frankenstein facility or maybe another one. You even see him in one of the ads for The Slaughterhouse.

Last scene is him and Joey heading to the city to go save Katherine and Donna.

Rest of the comic consists of a bunch of fucking ads for their other shit and urging you to flip the comic upside-down to read The Realm issue. Fuck that, it’s issue 9, I haven’t even read 1-8. I don’t know the goddamn story.

Issue 13

And here we have another fat double cover flip comic. This time the other comic is something called Beck and Caul issue 6 which apparently was the final issue for that series. Another one of Caliber’s comics that failed to gain an audience. Maybe if they had just focused on a few at a fucking time instead of showering the wall with shit they would’ve been able to have something last longer than six fucking issues.

Something like Deadworld only lasted due to the zombie aspect (Which was a bit rarer in those days) and it already having an established fanbase that probably consisted of the hardcore edgelords (Like me) that were just sticking it out because hey came this far might as well see it to the end now.

Speaking of which, let’s get on with it.

Starts off with the Boss and KZ having an argument about who is in charge and ultimately the Boss gets sick of KZ being an upstart and throws his ass to the ground and commands the various demons and zombies to kill him.

Cut to Katherine and Donna being taken to some nice apartment to wait. Donna mentions that the leader seemed to know Katherine who says she’s met him before under similar circumstances. Donna says that she feels like she knows him too, but she can’t place him. Donna urges Katherine that they need to escape, but Katherine is just confident that DK will come for her.

Donna knows all too well that waiting around for your boyfriend to save you is a recipe for RAPE or worse so she’s not as optimistic as Katherine always seems to be that DK will save the day.

Bowker enters his apartment like swaggering douchebag and as soon as Donna gives him some lip, he smacks her across the face telling her to respect his authoritah! Katherine shouts that he doesn’t have to do this, to which Bowker says he doesn’t have to do a lot of shit, for example he doesn’t have to keep either of them alive and could just use them as zombie food.

That’s when Donna recognizes who he is, and goes on about the first time he shoved her and the others into that holding area and killed Mike and John. (To be fair, he really didn’t directly do that. John got bit by a zombie girl and Mike’s death was a result of Eddie and Punk’s careless accident.) She tries to kick him in the balls, but he’ quick enough that he catches her foot and knocks her on her ass. He tells some of his men to take her away and they can have fun with her until her spirit is tamed. Donna’s an old pro at the gang rape though so she’s hardly scared and spits in his face before being dragged away.

Katherine on the other hand is calm about the situation merely stating that DK will be coming for her. Bowker says that he probably will, but by the time he does he’s going to find things a little different than last time because he’s in control now.

Now, I sort of wondered if he just meant in control since he’s not a zombie lackey and has his little domain, or if he literally meant he was control of the WHOLE city. Like I said, you never see Moloch, Renya or that Hendricks guy ever again. It is completely possible Bowker wasn’t pleased about getting the shit end of the deal again (Putting Hendricks above him) and eventually performed his own coup on those three and taking over completely.

I doubt it, since he doesn’t seem like he’d want to deal with the boring shit of running said city, but then he’d probably have guys like Holzinger doing shit like that for him while he could focus on the fun stuff. (Like why I made Mizal an admin)

Cut back to KZ and the Boss having a Lich vs Demon magic battle since KZ was given more power by those other lords which the Boss didn’t realize. KZ gets the upper hand even causing the Boss to submit saying he gives up control. KZ says it’s too late for that and he’s got control anyway, but he’s going to kill the Boss slowly by draining his power little by little.

Cut to Joey and DK going stealth mode to sneak into the city gates. DK tells Joey how to slit someone’s throat silently but when the time comes, Joey’s a pussy that can’t kill another human. (Seriously Joey?) DK isn’t really mad about it, just proves what a Chad he is in comparison so he kills everyone as usual.

Cut back to KZ trying to control the zombies again who aren’t listening. A little imp tells him that there are a horde of zombies converging on the area to attack. The old oracle advises that maybe if he released the Boss, he’d be able to gain power over the zombies from whoever is controlling them. KZ is tired of the old oracle so he throws him to the zombies who eat him.

KZ does some more magic shit and he regains control of some them. Between those and the grakens he tells them to rip up the other zombies and tells the imps to find out who the hell is controlling the zombies. (Though he’d actually told some other imps before to go follow some zombies to find out what was going on)

Yet another oracle (Who presumably had come in through the gate when it got opened again) asks what about the Boss since he’s weakened but still alive. KZ says he’ll deal with him later, he has to take care of whoever is controlling all his zombies first.

Cut back to Bowker who tells Katherine she’ll be staying in his apartment as long as she complies with what he says. She’s still giving the line that DK will be coming for her. Bowker says if it wasn’t for him, DK would be dead since he saved his life by shooting KZ so he figures DK owes him.

And since DK owes him, well Katherine’s a good form of payment…

He even says she offered herself to him before to save his life, and this time there’s no conditions. Katherine states she’s not giving up the pussy, but Bowker said he wasn’t asking.

At this point the screaming starts and Bowker says it’s not going to change anything and after he’s done with her, they’ll see if DK will still want her.

Okay, this is one of those moments where it’s like…really? They REALLY had to turn Bowker into a woman beating rapist just to prove what an asshole he was?

Granted Bowker has always been that morally dark gray character and there’s always the argument that murdering someone is worse than raping them so “what’s the big deal?” since he’s having innocents shot and throwing people into cages for zombie food.

However, we all know there’s the “Rape is a special kind of evil” trope. So when someone does it, it’s usually to make sure someone is firmly considered a “bad guy”

Okay fine, but I feel like it sort of went against Bowker’s personality a bit. Like yeah he’s always going to be a militaristic dick that doesn’t have too much of a moral compass, but he sort of at least seemed like he respected DK enough that he wouldn’t have RAPED his girlfriend.

Keep her captive sure, maybe even pressure her into sex by capturing DK and torturing him. But I just didn’t see him as doing the outright rape. Hell, like I said a few posts up, he could have fucked Katherine back in To Kill A King and just not kept his word about helping her if he really wanted to fuck her that badly.

Well anyway, that’s it for this issue. Rest is ad bullshit and that other shitty comic I don’t care about (And apparently nobody else did either)

Issue 14

This starts out with grakens killing zombies and some hell hounds helping out too. The voodoo girl is going on some dumb monologue about how even though these creatures are strong they cannot match the numbers of the dead and eventually fall to them.

You get a pretty cool battle scene between undead and demons so that’s pretty metal at least.

Cut to Voodoo girl hugging on Dan (Who is STILL in a fucking trance like a retard) saying about how she controls all the zombies, at which point KZ pops up saying not all of them.

He tells her to give her boyfriend one last kiss unless she wants him to kill him first. Then he recognizes that it’s Dan.

“You? You’ve been a thorn in my side since day one boy.” - KZ

He states that now he’s really going to enjoy this.

Cut to Donna in a cell with some woman named Gina who hears the doors opening saying can’t they just leave them alone. Donna tells her when they do the raping, she just has to imagine herself somewhere else because she can’t let them break her mind.

So basically Donna’s already been gang raped AGAIN. (This is like that story Mizal made)

Fortunately there’s no more raping because it’s Joey and DK that are unlocking the door. DK asks where Katherine is and Donna says she’s with Bowker. This immediately causes a look of alarm in him and Donna tells him that she can show him the building where she was so she might still be there.

He then throws the keys to the Gina girl telling her to free everyone else but to give them a 15 minute head start before they start making a bunch of noise.

DK, Donna and Joey get out but at this point Donna’s leg is all fucked up from all the raping (Among other places no doubt) so DK just asks her which building it was and tells Joey to go to the place where he told the Brunson people to go since they’re not going to be of any use in the rescue attempt. Joey and Donna comply and they exit the scene.

Cut back to KZ who is having his showdown with voodoo girl. KZ states that Dan isn’t going to stop him, but VG says it doesn’t matter, he’ll slow KZ down and even if he’s killed, Dan will still be hers.

KZ effortlessly throws Dan aside (Who apparently was useless even as a voodoo zombie) saying he’ll deal with him later and states VG can chant all she wants but it won’t do any good. Then he gets hit with zombie brain freeze or something and he starts clutching his head. He then collapses, but doesn’t quite pass out.

Cut to Katherine in Bowker’s bed after the raping. She gets up and walks to the toilet to throw up cursing Bowker and then looking in the mirror stating that he may have her body but he’ll never have anything else from her.

And cue the Vamp appearing behind her from the shadows.

Katherine asks who she is and the Vamp doesn’t even answer, she just says she’s always considered Bowker to be HER man, and she doesn’t like to share.

“But he RAPED me!” - Katherine
“Doesn’t matter. I don’t care what kind of games you play, pretending not to want it. The fact is you gave him your body. Your live body. And I’m not happy about it…” - The Vamp

Now that right there is some hardcore victim blaming!

Cut back to KZ who snaps out of his zombie headache and wondering where the fuck Voodoo girl and Dan went. He realizes he’s got full control over the zombies again so he’s happy about that at least.

Cut to Voodoo girl and Dan who is now finally out of his trance. He’s super pissed about her mind controlling him and says he’ll kill her if she ever does that again. She says she wouldn’t be able to though since his mind would be prepared for it. He asks what happened and she states she managed to hold KZ back, but it took all her power to do so. She had to release control of all the zombies and Dan and even then it wasn’t going to hold him for long, so she took off.

Dan doesn’t understand why she just didn’t kill him, but she says she didn’t think she had enough power to do so and she was more worried about keeping him safe. He still doesn’t understand why he’s so important or what the hell she’s going on about. (And neither do the readers)

At last VG breaks it all down saying that Dan has “The Way” (Lol) inside him asking didn’t he always feel like he had a sixth sense about zombies being around. She mentions some people are just born with it like her. VG’s mom also had it and used voodoo to control the zombies but underestimated KZ’s power. Dan asks what happened to her to which VG says KZ killed her. She saw it happen and mentions Dan saw it happen too.

Yep, the fat black voodoo priestess way back in the old Deadworld volume 1 was her mom hence why she knew all about Dan. She then says that together they can make a bunch of babies that will have have the power to really fight back against the zombies. Create a new human race, basically an Adam and Eve type thing.

I dunno, it’s retarded. The way they handled the voodoo plotline shit just never grabbed me.

Cut back to DK who has gotten access to Bowker’s apartment and he’s crouching, rolling and doing all this stealth shit coming in until he finds Katherine in Bowker’s bed a bloody fucking mess and dead eyes.

All he can do is look on and despair as he apologizes for not getting there in time.

And that’s it for the comic.

There’s also a Deaditoral at the end which is REALLY laying it on with the excuses before the last issue. Hell they even apologize for the shitty artwork at times (“Drawing zombies I guess is more work then they imagined.” - Editor with a snide comment about the various artists)

They state all the troubles with the comic. Old readers dropping out, new readers not wanting to pick up in the middle of a series, etc. They go on about how they’re really needing to start fresh again, they just need to do a bit more re-organizing.

But they don’t want to just restart with an issue 1 again, (Since that obviously didn’t work last time) So when the third volume of Deadworld starts up again it’ll start with issue 50 since there was 26 total in the first set, then the 3 part DK vs KZ series, 15 with this second set and then there’s going to be a 5 issue miniseries bringing it up to 49.

The miniseries is Slaughterhouse of course because they’ve only been hyping it up since the last fucking four comics.

Anyway a lot of promises as usual.

“Trust us.” - The editors

Yeah, fucking right. Let’s just finish this.

Issue 15

Alright, So KZ’s making plans for the final war against humanity He tells a couple of imps to go seek out the voodoo bitch and then heads back to the Boss who is still in a spirit prison that KZ put him in. One of the oracles tells him that he can’t kill the Boss since his essence is still a vital link of keeping the gates open. KZ isn’t buying it though and tells his whispies to start draining the Boss of all his energy.

Cut to some of Bowker’s men looking for Punk and Eddie who are for some inexplicable reason hiding out in the fucking city. Like they had a damn jeep. If they were going AWOL they should have just driven off as far away as fucking possible from Bowker’s city (Or Moloch’s city, who fucking knows who’s in charge). Then again they’re idiots.

Last you see of Punk and Eddie is them running from Bowker’s men and heading to a basement of a theater since that’s where Wolverine is.

Done with them three.

Cut to Donna and Joey finding their way to leper cave where Darcy is overjoyed to see him again. They also meet Darcy’s leper mom. Donna still wants to go out to find Dan, but even Darcy’s mom is like you lot need to fucking rest awhile and regain some life points first. Meanwhile Joey and Darcy are totally going to do it.

Done with those three.

Cut to DK still morning Katherine’s body just as Bowker walks in wondering what the hell is going on. DK immediately attacks even though Bowker says he didn’t kill her. DK doesn’t care since he brought her here in the first place. The two of them get into a long fight, but eventually DK gets the upper hand stating Bowker’s worse than the zombies and says he can join his friends slicing his throat.

Done with DK (But not Bowker quite yet)

Cut to (ugh) Dan and Voodoo girl where she’s prattling on about making a new race, but Dan’s no interested in any of that and leaves to go find Donna and Joey stating he always finds them.

It’s actually a bit longer of a scene, but it really isn’t important and I want to be done with their shit, which is now. (Thankfully)

Cut to the Vamp who must have just missed out on seeing DK leave the apartment since she comes back to find Bowker dead. She’s pretty upset about it and says to his corpse (He’s not a zombie yet) to not worry because they’ll get him. (Probably knowing it was DK, in fact it seems like the Vamp was going to be involved in the Slaughterhouse in some way too since there’s an ad of it with a tattooed woman which is probably her)

That’s it for those two.

Finally cut back to KZ who is having the Boss drained of all his energy despite the oracle telling him he really shouldn’t do this bad thing. KZ refuses to listen and continues only for there to be an energy overload which destroys everything in the area, including KZ leaving only his sunglasses behind.

The End…For Now.

Next you get another Deaditorial stating that the “Middle is Near” meaning that the series is far from being over with and lots of great stuff coming up!

But before those lies, there is ONE more thing in this comic and that’s a preview of the Slaughterhouse comic.

Well it’s basically a lot of narration of a bunch of terrible shit happening and you see DK (or rather a silhouette of him) in a few panels going on about the lack of faith in humanity. Something about a red substance being dropped from the sky. Some Frankenstein monster like creature being made. Some dudes in gas masks. Yeah it’s all a bit disjointed, but it was basically showing what was coming up.

IF SLAUGHTERHOUSE ACTUALLY EVER FUCKING CAME OUT

Yep, never did. In fact for a long time I thought maybe I missed it or something but nope it just never came out and neither did a 50th issue of Deadworld. All that fucking hype for nothing. The series was effectively over.

Well, not quite, but ‘ll get to the spin off shit next post.

What an astoundingly stupid and unsatisfying way to end it all. I would've loved to see the letters sent in after this one.

Deadworld (The One Shots)

Okay so while it’s technically over for the series, there’s actually still quite a bit left. Like more than you’d think really for a “Dead comic”

As I mentioned before this series was notorious for its one shots and spin offs. Failure to launch Slaughterhouse aside, there were some others that they actually followed through on. We’ll go in roughly chronological order.

Bits & Pieces

Now this one actually came out towards end of the first volume of the Deadworld series. It’s less of a one shot story and more of a collection of Deadworld stories that didn’t show up in the actual comic itself. Like one of these stories appeared as a preview story in one of those “The Realm” comics all the way back when Arrow still owned both titles.

In fact that one in particular could be considered the prologue of the OG gang and KZ. It mostly focuses on Donna who got separated from the others and nearly getting eaten by a horde of zombies until the rest of the group finds her. Dan scolds her for getting separated while the other girl Chris (Remember her?) tells Dan to lay off of her.

Meanwhile it shows KZ and his other two original smart zombie buddies watching them from afar.

The next story takes place during Mike’s interrogation when Moloch was throwing him out a helicopter repeatedly. The helicopter in this case has landed for awhile as the militia sweeps the woods looking for KZ. Bowker’s barking orders, and there’s a brief exchange between Mike and Moloch about what he knows about KZ.

Then it cuts to two of the soldiers looking through the woods not taking any of this seriously, while the other one is scared. Doesn’t take long before the goofy one (Ralph) gets a graken fist right through his head while KZ grabs the scared one (Billy) and starts questioning him for information on his community.

Billy gives the info up immediately, KZ thanks him and is about to kill him, but he begs for mercy saying not to splatter his brains since he wants to be a zombie, which surprises KZ.

And it’s here that KZ gives a pretty good rant.

“Do you know what it means to be a zombie? You’ll crave flesh. Any kind of flesh: Human, animal or insect as long as it’s alive. You’ll begin to decay. Maggots will rest in your belly. You’ll roam the earth until your flesh rots from your bones. Is that what you want Billy, maggots burrowing through your body while you search for zombie munchies until your BALLS fall off?” - KZ

“Er…ya…” - Billy

“You’re SICK!” - KZ

However KZ then goes on to say he likes that, which then causes Billy to smile, just before KZ breaks his neck and says he’s happy to oblige.

“Of course you’ll have a hell of time going about your zombie life with your head floppin’ about like a wet noodle.” - KZ

Next short is someone in a Santa suit looking at a community from afar with binoculars narrating about how it’s celebrating Christmas like there wasn’t a zombie plague going on. There’s some other thoughts going on about how it’s the attempt to maintain the illusion of normalcy, wondering where they got the big Christmas tree from, etc.

Then there’s more inner monologue about a signal going up and an alarm being disconnected and stating it’s time for Santa to pay a visit. Some zombies appear behind the shadowy figure dressed as Santa and you find out it’s KZ.

He’s yelling at another smart zombie saying where the hell are their elf ears and that they can’t go down yet without being dressed for Christmas. The other smart zombie says the rest of the zombies left already towards the village and these zombies were just more stragglers. KZ rushes to his bike saying he’s gotta get down there before they miss the open gate and trip the alarms.

He then says, maybe he can’t blame them too much since maybe they remember Christmas too and they’re anxious to start the celebration. Ends with KZ riding down to the village saying “Here comes Santa Claus. Ho ho ho!” with the image of some children in his mirrored sunglasses.

Final story is some guy running through a ruined city cursing his buddy telling him it was safe there. As he’s running he notices a store with a big fat guy operating it like its the most normal thing ever. He enters the store and says doesn’t he know there’s zombies all over the place to which the fat store owner says:

“Well son, as my grandpa used to say, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your neighbors…or was that you can’t pick your friend’s nose?” - Fat Store Owner

The man can’t believe this guy is for real saying zombies want to eat him, not buy his shit and adding that he’d make a hell of a meal for them too. The man then gets the shit scared out of him by a zombie in the store.  

The fat guy though isn’t bothered saying that it’s just his stock boy Willie. Also goes on to say that he doesn’t talk much and he’s slow as hell, but he works cheap. The man notices Willie’s just put up a sign saying guns for sale, so he immediately grabs one and points it at Willie.

The fat guy tells him to leave Willie alone as he never hurt anyone and minds his own business. The man tells him to just keep Willie away as he starts exiting the store. The fat guy then says there’s a little matter of price involved for the gun since while they may sell things for cheap they don’t just give them away. The man says the check is in the mail and just runs out the store with the gun.

Believing he has a chance now, he’s running through the city again and when the horde of zombies show up he cockily says he’s got something for them now and pulls the trigger. And again. And again. And again…

Only to learn there’s no bullets in the fucking guy and he gets horribly eaten.

Cut back to the fat store owner praising Willie saying that the display looks real nice, adding that it should considering it took Willie two days.

Final bit is Willie putting up one more sign under the Gun For Sale saying “Bullets not included”

All of these stories were drawn by the original artist Vince Locke so they all had the old school Deadworld look making them visually better. (Well to me anyway)

Roadkill

This one is a bit odd. Like really odd. It’s a comic, but it literally reads more like a short story. It’s mostly text with some full page illustrations here and there. It’s like the writer of this one really wanted to write a book rather than a comic. (More on that later)

There were a few ads for this one, but I didn’t even see it until probably a few years long after it had already come out and even then I only stumbled upon it going through a old comic box of the unsold stuff in the store. I picked it up knowing nothing about it, so I was surprised to see that it was a short story rather than a proper comic.

So then I tossed it aside and never actually read it for probably a few months since… well I mean you expect me to read something without pictures? You haven’t been paying attention! (Okay it had a few pictures, but you know what I mean) Eventually though I got bored enough to read it and it was okay I guess. Honestly I don’t remember an excessive amount of detail to it, but here’s the basic premise.

It follows an intelligent zombie biker called Hitch. And anytime you see a picture of Hitch he looks a lot like KZ as far as his style of biker clothing and his hair. About the major difference is Hitch has sort of a split screen look going on similar to Two Face though it extends to more than just his face. Half of his body isn’t just rotten flesh it’s pretty much skeletal.

His signature weapon is a meathook with a long chain attached to it. Not sure what they were going for there, but that’s what you usually see him with.

So he’s not like all the other intelligent zombies in that he doesn’t have some immediate hatred of humans thing going on. If anything he’s sort of on a personal journey to figure out why he’s different. Lot of inner monologue.

The plot hook is him bumping into a woman called Dakota and he finds out she escaped from some compound called Spandau that’s run by a guy called Fredrick who literally thinks he’s Hitler or at least a reincarnated version of him. He’s going on about bringing about the 4th Reich and that whole Oktoberfest. Dakota wants to save her two kids and Hitch is…well he’s offering to help because he’s trying to find out answers about himself mostly and this Neo Nazi camp sounds like it’s up to some weird science and might have some answers.

The “Little” Hitler besides planning on remaking humanity as Nazis often want to do, he also has some sort of weapon that just murders the shit out of zombies. This is what Hitch is most interested in. Or its at least peaked his interest, since the story is sort of vague on his motives other than he needs some serious firepower to go somewhere in Michigan. (Probably Detroit)

Dakota and Hitch go back to Spandau and as you might expect, everything goes to shit resulting in them both getting captured. Little Hitler is very intrigued by Hitch since he’s never encountered a smart zombie before, so in come the experiments which vary from him not feeling anything to him somehow feeling pain as if he was alive again.

There is definitely some weird Nazi tech going on since they have some sort of giant ray gun that when they shoot the zombies with it, the zombies stop attacking humans and start eating each other. Wild shit eh?

To cut a long story short: the kids Dakota was trying to save get killed, Her and Hitch get free, Spandau gets overrun by zombies and ultimately Hitch fights Little Hitler who is piloting some giant mech Castle Wolfenstein 3D style. (Even a picture of that)

Little Hitler gets the upper hand and is about to kill Hitch, but he’s shot in the head by Dakota (who was thought to be dead at that point) Ultimately he comes away with no answers, but he gets a new motorcycle out of the deal and continues his search to understand himself or something.

So there was a planned sequel to this one called “Heat.” There were ads for this one in Deadworld comics too, in fact I think there were more ads for this one than Roadkill.

However, much like a lot of Caliber promises, Heat never materialized, so there was no sequel or at least not from Caliber.

This story apparently was completed with a different publisher and in a more traditional novel format. The novel was called “Dead Heat” and it included bits of Roadkill, along with some other adventure he had written for Hitch with another company called December (He was up in Michigan I believe) and a third final act which only was in the novel.

Even just reading the comic back then, it definitely didn’t feel like a “Deadworld” story. Nothing really felt like it connected with the rest of that world other than Hitch being a smart zombie. (And he wasn’t like KZ who wasn’t really a zombie so much as he was an evil wispy inhabiting a corpse shell.) It’s obvious the author was just sort of using the Deadworld brand to get his own zombie story idea out there. Not that there weren’t interesting ideas there though.

Plague

This one is dull mess.

It’s supposed to be a look at the world just before the zombies popped up and it’s just really disjointed. Also filled with some religious symbolism here and there. Seems like it was more to showcase the artist’s work since definitely focuses on the art rather than any storyline. Wasn’t a fan of the artwork either, so the comic just sucked for me all around.

Moving on…

The Dire Wolves

This is the last Deadworld one shot story I found. Once again found this one rummaging through some unsold backlog. This time it was at a comic convention though and seeing that I didn’t have this one, I bought it. Didn’t realize it was the author selling his own shit so when I said I was buying and handing him the four dollars, he took it and signed it as well before giving it to me.

Motherfucker, I didn’t ask for you to draw all over my fucking comic book! (Nah, I didn’t give a shit. Just was a little surprising that’s all)

This one feels more like it’s set in Deadworld, but it’s probably a bit more text heavy due to mostly told in journal format. The journal specifically belongs to Dr. Russell Matheson and it’ll be him that all the events and details are told through that perspective.

Starts off with him entering a gated dig site where a bunch of dirty Injuns are protesting because it’s on sacred land or some shit. Ignoring all that shit Russell goes in to meet the other eggheads. Russell is partially there as the “University man” and report progress to them.

Dr. Roberts is the one in charge and he’s generally a dick. He already tells part of Russell’s main job is going to be dealing with the protestors while another egghead called Dr. Rickman smirks that he got his job.

The journal generally jumps ahead a few days at a time. The next entry mentions how Russell’s not too happy about having to deal with the protestors, so he ends up speaking a lot with one of the students Ellen who is keeping him up to date on what’s being dug up.

Later on they go fuck in the place where they’re keeping all the shit they’ve dug up and that’s where Russell is amazed by the findings. Lots of prehistoric type animals that are in pretty good condition all things considering. He starts spending a lot of time with Ellen in general.

Things get worse with the protestors as Chief Duffy has been forced by the protestors to tell the egghead crew they can’t bring anymore help or equipment on to the land. Later on someone throws a pipe bomb over the fence which turns out to be a dude. One of the diggers MacRae puts up razor wire on top of the fence.

Two dudes arrive Gregg and Daryl. Dr. Roberts has hired them as extra muscle. One is an Ex-navy seal while the other one has an unknown background. Later on Russell reports all this stuff to the University which then results in Roberts firing Russell for being a snitch. Granted he might not have snitched if Roberts had literally thrown Russell a bone by letting him play in the dirt with the fossils.

So he decides he’s going to fuck Ellen one more time and at some point he leaves briefly to take a piss and comes back to a horrible sight.

He sees a zombie eating Ellen and it’s mentioned that was the first time he killed a zombie. Didn’t take long before more zombies are coming out of the woods and he runs back to the dig compound. Russell pulls the fire alarm to alert everyone. Fortunately Dr. Roberts decided long ago that his dig site was a fucking survivalist base since he’s got a stockpile of automatic weapons for people to use. The zombies get blasted to hell safely from behind the gate for the most part. Even the ones that manage to climb, get caught up on the barbwire.

Exit Dr. Roberts who commits suicide soon after all this shit goes down. The one who takes over is a grad student called Simon who takes a more practical survival approach and goes out to secure rations. Dr. Rickman who got Russel’s job mostly retreats into delusion, still digging up shit like everything is going to go back to normal.

It mostly goes on about how Russel slowly starts becoming more of a survivalist, learning how to hunt, shoot, etc. They’re in rural northern Canada so there aren’t many zombies in general. (A brief mention that one of the zombies they kill looked like Chief Duffy)

Along the looting way, one of them (Kazman) gets shot by someone protecting their safe space. It turns out to be James Kicking Stones who was one of the main protestors at the rally. He joins the group and Russell says he’s surprised that his reaction is one of positivity since Kicking Stones and his buddy will be more useful to the group than Kazman ever would (Apparently he was a freeloading slacker)

Kicking Stones brings up some Injun mysticism shit, but at this point Russell keeps an open mind about it since there’s zombies wandering around. Already he’s trying to make plans for how they’re going to have to convert to wood burning eventually when the oil runs out.

Some guy named Bruce get separated at some point so he’s gone. Later on the leader, Simon collapses with blood in his shit. A guy named Jim is premed and determines it’s colon cancer, so Simon dies a few weeks later from that.

Yeah, the whole story is sort of like this, bringing up characters that apparently were on the compound, but you don’t really find out about them until they die. (Or only a little bit before) Still, this didn’t really bother me, since it’s really only Russell who is the main focus because it’s his journal.

Later on one of the local dudes Todd marries a local girl Ann who is very pregnant. Russell mentions he performs the ceremony. She gives birth soon after and it gives Russell a bit of hope.

One night they have a bit of a party and Russell talks about how they’ve all become more tribal and such. Later they see a group in the distance and think it’s zombies heading their way. One of them thinks maybe it’s regular people coming to tell them everything is back to normal. In any case, they patrols all sides of their compound, but everything is clear and Russell was confident in their fortress.

Cue the bit where it’s not an external threat they needed to worry about, but an internal one. Rickman is playing around with his dead animal carcasses and that’s when they all suddenly come to life. The dire wolves and even the fucking mastodon which gores Rickman as it comes crashing out of the containment space it was in.

(This is probably occurring sometime after KZ opened the gate long enough to resurrect anything that had ever died on Earth)

They manage to shoot the mastodon in the head downing it, but the dire wolves hang back a bit until they got a numbers advantage. Some of them get killed, but unfortunately ammo is running low. One guy named Tim makes a break for the fence, but the wolves get him.

Kicking Stones uses this chance to go run for more ammo. It’s mentioned Steve’s got a set of keys, but he’s on the south side of the fence and won’t be able to hear shit. Russell then mentions he has no idea why the fuck they put a deaf person by himself as a guard. (Cue Steve seen getting killed)

Russell also mentions that since all this began, they never paid attention to just how many fucking dire wolf corpses Rickman had dug up, but it was a fucking lot.

They manage to back into one of the buildings for defense. Kicking Stones has only found three shells in the building that he’s in. The dire wolves have successfully managed to separate the group to hold up in separately making it easier for them to attack.

A guy name Ray freezes up when he sees a zombie saber cat allowing the dire wolves to get him. Yet another guy (Bill) tries to make it across the compound and the wolves get him as well.

A bit of monologue about how the dire wolves have evolution on their side to be killing machines even without being zombified. They just aren’t equipped to handle them the same way as human zombies.

Digger (The only guy left with him now) mentions there’s keys in the main office and he’ll take the electrical conduit to get there. He tells Russell to just wait for him and he’ll be back in a half hour.

Russell waits, eventually falling asleep long after a half hour. Then he’s awakened by a knock on a door which turns out to be Kicking Stones, Todd and Ann. KS says they found more ammo, but no keys.

Then they all hear from the electrical conduit some scraping at the hatch and Russell states that it’s Digger and he’s got the keys. They open the hatch only for a dire wolf to pop out.

Well that was just stupid to assume that.

They end up wasting most of the ammo they found just to kill the thing. It’s decided they can’t wait for Digger any longer, but then they see Digger outside driving the car towards the building to pick them up. Their hope is gone though when he suddenly starts swerving all over the place due to a dire wolf hiding in the back seat to chomp on him.

Okay, how the fuck did a dire wolf silently hide in the fucking car? Like I get that they’re apex predators and all, but come on, they don’t have opposable thumbs to work a car door!

He flips the car and half falls out of it, with the dire wolf inside still eating his legs. He begs the group to stop even trying to pull him out and just kill him at this point, so Russell does.

Kicking Stones makes a heroic sacrifice telling the rest to run while he takes on the wolves which results in him slashing up one with a knife and then blowing himself up (And several wolves) using his lighter on top of the car which is leaking gas.

Russell and the other two run to the fence. Russell gets over the top, only to not clear the barbwire completely and his leg gets caught on it. He hangs upside down on the other side of the fence helplessly. Todd and Ann (Carrying the baby) start climbing. Todd gets a dire wolf biting his leg and pulling him. Todd’s about to die and he tells Ann to keep climbing.

That’s when Ann does something Russell doesn’t know if she did intentionally or by accident as she was climbing.

She drops the baby.

This distracts the wolves long enough that the one lets go of Todd and he’s able to escape (Even though he’s in shock along with Russell who they manage to get down)

Russell then goes into a bit of wildlife comparison of how a mother will sometimes leave an offspring if there is no other choice for survival. After all, the mother can live to have more children.

“But people don’t think like animals…or do they?” - Russell

The three of them stomp through the woods not saying much, Russell notices his leg is looking bad from the deep razor wire wound. They find a farm house and cook up some chickens they find there and take a pick up truck that’s half filled with gas.

Only for the truck to break down soon after and they’re back to stomping around in the woods again, except now Todd had to build a stretcher to drag Russell because his leg is fucked.

They get to the closest town only to find it burned to the ground. They had a little luck though, a stove still contained a little fuel managing to heat up a room.

Todd tells Russell that they got some snow mobiles loaded with supplies. Enough for three and asks if he won’t come with them. Russell however knows his leg is gangrenous now and he’ll die soon. He says he’s just going to stay warm. Todd thanks him for every thing and says good luck. Russell tell him good luck.

Russell then says he was a scientist once and he will be again.

The last panel (On the inside of the back cover, which is a bit unusual) is him sitting in a chair alone looking at his leg wondering what happens when just an appendage dies. He wonders if it will zombify and work independent of its master.

“I’ll learn soon.” - Dr. Russell Matherson, Snow Lake, Canada, sometime in November.

Other than a few quibbles, I felt this actually was one of the best side stories in Deadworld.

Necropolis

Finally we get to the last one of the bunch. I’m not going to spend too much time on this one mainly because it’s literally self-insert fanfic by the author. No, really. He actually states in the back of the comic that the same author of Dire Wolves met him at a convention and stated he should try his hand at writing a zombie story, so he came up with this concept.

Oddly despite being self-insert fanfic, it isn’t bad mainly because it never lets up with the humorous tone and bloody action. In fact I remember it being one I read couple times since by the time it came out, there hadn’t been any new Deadworld shit for quite awhile so this was a port in any storm type thing. It’s actually a pretty sizable comic too. (64 pages and only 4 of those aren’t actual story)

It’s basically the author and a few of his buddies surviving the zombie apocalypse in fucking New York city. Specifically Manhattan. Lot of apartment to apartment fighting and such. It also features a smart female zombie who is wrapped up in duct tape (Except her face) like a mummy. She goes by the name Kali and is the ongoing antagonist in the story.

She also calls herself “Queen Zombie” that’s looking for her King.

Amusingly the author meets a woman that ends up becoming his girlfriend that also survives to the end, meanwhile he actually kills off his two real life buddies in the comic. Lol. Not sure if the woman was real too since she isn’t mentioned in the back of the credits like his buddies are.

Naturally he also defeats Kali in the final showdown at the Statue of Liberty as well. He ends the tale with sometimes hearing rumors about a King Zombie and how he hopes he never has to deal with him one day.

And THAT is it!

Well sort of.

Yeah, the tale of Deadworld isn’t quite over yet, but we’re really starting to get to last remnants of what they kept trying to do to make this zombie franchise continue to shamble along.

Deadworld (The Spinoffs)

Now my goal was to be finished with this series by Halloween. And after this post I will have accomplished it as far as I’m concerned.

However, I’m a bit of a completionist, so I’ll probably touch a little bit on the reboots and a few other things as well. Though I’m probably not going into as much detail with these if they’re aren’t catching my interest. (Remember, I am skimming through all this stuff again because I haven’t read these in years).

Alright remember that picture that Mizal posted called Tattoo? Well we’re unfortunately getting to that one now.

Tattoo

And where to begin with this one…alright I’ll go into some detail, but not really storyline wise because honestly it’s not all that great.

Okay so Tattoo was a 4 issue mini-series and probably an attempt to re-invent the Deadworld franchise. Remember the original Arrow comic writers Ralph and Stu? (Of course you don’t because you haven’t even read this far) Well after a second attempt of failing to resurrect Arrow comics (A tale for another time) they got jobs with Caliber comics where they mostly worked on a GRIMDARK series called “Oz” based on Wizard of Oz (A tale for another time!)

So probably because Caliber was having their own struggles with Deadworld they figured “Hey maybe the original writers and do something with this train wreck we created!” and put those two on the case. Enter Tattoo.

How I even stumbled upon this first comic was actually through Ralpha and Stu at a comic convention who were selling all their old shit and were also hyping their new Tattoo series. Seeing as I did enjoy the older Deadworld comics and the Oz series, I figured I might as well give it a try.

So let’s get the basics out of the way because I’m not really going to do an issue by issue review of this shit.

Tattoo, the chick on the cover that Mizal posted is fucking Donna.

Yeah gang rape girl.

So why the hell is she running around half naked in just a bikini? (Not even chainmail)

Well because she got fused with the Vamp who was trying to take her over during some battle she was having with Deadkiller’s crew. Something got fucked and the two merged. After a bit of personality conflict, Donna managed to take control (Even though she “died”) and Tattoo emerged. Though she wasn’t all tatted like a biker whore initially (Despite being with a bunch of bikers at one time) at some point she goes back to that old tattooist because she feels the need to get the tats (Left over from her Vamp personality) The old tattooist is very surprised that her skin is warm.

You see flashbacks of all this stuff and amusingly they draw the Vamp very similar to Vampirella in this incarnation of her. Even her outfit, which is just a minor bit of “copycatism” compared to fucking Tattoo herself. (More on that later)

So with this new fusion of life and death, Donna becomes this super badass one girl army that is suddenly super skilled with katanas and melee combat.

Keep in mind by this time, this was the mid 90s and the whole “Bad girl” protagonist craze was really big in comics at the time. One of the more famous of these “bad girls” was a “Chaos! Comics” character known as Lady Death. (Maybe if I ever get REALLY ambitious, I’ll do a review on ALL my Chaos! Comics)

Who Tattoo was obviously modeled after in more than even just her hawt physical appearance and big blonde hair. In fact, this might be my biggest complaint about this shitshow.

Tattoo even has control of two demon dire wolves just like Lady Death! I remember the first time I read this and was like “Ralph and Stu fucking read Lady Death and just changed things up to fit her into the Deadworld Universe!” As I remember at some point in a different one shot of Tattoo, she gets a magic sword (Again similar to something Lady Death carried around)

Okay so knock offs aren’t necessarily a bad thing and I liked Lady Death, but Tattoo was no damn Lady Death by a long shot. She was still fucking Donna as far as I was concerned and infusing her with the Vamp’s supernatural shit wasn’t wowing me.

However, as I said, I am a completionist, so I stuck with it for the whole 4 issue run while Dimestore Lady Death went up against Dimestore King Zombie.

Oh yeah, you get a poor man’s version of KZ in the form of “Rastaman” who is basically a black version of KZ but not as funny. (Similar mirrored glasses and smoking habit)  He doesn’t even have the cool long dreads, he’s got those little short ones and with how indistinct the hair is drawn, he ends up looking more like a meaner version of zombie Michael Jackson (No nose of course)

Besides the other old characters I already mentioned, that Voodoo girl that was fucking Dan pops back up, however she’s “dead” now and working for Rastaman. There’s one of those little evil wisps inside the body and she’s got long hair now rather than the cancer patient look she had before. (Amusing that the zombie has more vanity about her appearance.) She sort of acts as Dimestore Vamp to Rastaman, except she’s no where near as horny and she still retains the voodoo powers of the body so she’s casting spells.

Speaking of Dan, he actually pops up too. It’s during a flashback scene when Donna reappears from her trip to the old tattoo artist back at DK’s place where she says her goodbyes to them since she’s got a new “purpose” now. It’s about here where DK reintroduces Dan (Hey, he finally found him!) to try to convince Donna to stay, but despite Dan’s really half assed attempt to woo her, she’s not having any of it.

Oh right, the over all plot of the story: Tattoo hooks up with more black guys than a Blacked porn video to fight Rastaman and his Voodoo bitch who are trying to find another gate keeper. She ends up chopping off Rastaman’s head and sends him back to his demon dimension, but Voodoo bitch gets away. (Lol Rasta didn’t even survive the mini-series)

DK pops back up to help out a bit too by recruiting all the black guys that miraculously managed to survive to the end since Donna can’t be the only white savior in this thing.

DK tries to convince Donna to come back, but she keeps insisting that Donna was her slave name and she’s now Tattoo and she has to go seek out another gate opener and more evil wispies. And rides off on her motorcycle because all badass loners ride motorcycles.

That's it, and other than a one shot cross over with something else, there weren’t any other Tattoo stories that I know of, thank fucking god.

The one shot was called Daemonstorm: Tattoo. And that was part of the major crossover attempt that Caliber was doing with several of their worlds. In fact I think the original “Daemonstorm” originated from that “The Realm” comic, but later there was another fantasy comic they did called Legendlore which seemed to be a reboot of The Realm (Probably horse fucked that series too).

I used to have the one shot, but pretty sure it got lost somewhere during a move or something. The only thing of importance with that one is King Zombie suddenly resurrects at the end saying “Hey I’m back!” (Which was pretty much the ONLY character that could try to save Deadworld at this point!)

So yeah, Tattoo sucked. Probably why I didn’t even remember much about it other than some basics and really didn’t feel like rereading it again.

Anyway, might as well do the absolute last Deadworld spin off of the “old series.”

King Zombie (It’s about fucking time)

As you can tell by the title, this series has KZ as the main protagonist, which they really should have just done fucking YEARS ago.

By this time, it’s the late 90s and somehow Deadworld still limping along, but this one really would be the last of the old series continuity. And even then the continuity is a bit hazy.

Okay so real quick. This series seems to do a mild retcon of a few things and it’s hard to know exactly which direction they were going.

A few possibilities exist:

1. They retconned KZ dying at the end and they also ignored the entire Tattoo saga. Now THIS one makes the most sense and honestly, it’s probably the best explanation. (I’m going with this one)

2. They didn’t retcon KZ dying at the end and this is a continuation of the very last Tattoo one shot where you see KZ come back to life.

My feelings on Tattoo aside, this would make sense as well, however there’s a problem with this theory mainly because Donna’s in this comic and she isn’t Tattoo. Of course this could possibly mean…

3. This is an “intequel” before Donna became Tattoo.

This makes the least sense however since KZ still got killed and didn’t come back to life until after the Tattoo one shot.

So let’s just go with theory 1 because we can ignore all that Tattoo shit. Sounds good to me.

This one starts out with a brief flashback of KZ when he was alive (As Fiderman?). He’s making some symbols on a wall and holding a severed head while humming a tune. He’s interrupted by someone trying to shoot him and he runs out of the building to escape on his bike, driving straight into some hell portal.

Cut to “modern day” and KZ is going through some magic tomes and having his minions restrain some human who apparently is a sorcerer that worshipped KZ’s old Boss. The human cult isn’t happy about KZ’s coup so they’re trying to get their shit together to kill him and restore their old lord. KZ mentions he’s a bit of an overachiever and isn’t worried about them and that eventually he’ll find them all. A graken then rips the sorcerer apart.

Cut to…Clarence, Kirk and Stacy? Well what the hell, let’s see what these three have been up to, it’s been awhile after all.

Well they did find a nice little Caribbean island that we last saw them heading to search for. However, the odd thing is Stacy and Clarence are awfully close with one another…wasn’t she fucking Kirk last time? She’s also pregnant again.

Now, it’s never outright stated what might be going on and you could just either assume that maybe the writers fucked up the continuity by putting her with Clarence, but I THINK they got a poly romance thing going on and Kirk and Clarence just decided to tag team her and she was cool with it because Stacys gonna Stacy.

You could also conclude that Kirk’s just a big kuck. Either one wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, they apparently are the only three on this little island and Stacy’s wondering if there’s anyone else out there at all. Clarence really isn’t in a hurry to find out since they got a good thing going on here.

But enough of this degeneracy let’s get back to KZ.

KZ’s wiping out a human town saying he’s been too lax seeing how hard the human pockets fight back like they have any sort of chance. He says he’ll have to wipe them all out if he’s ever going to be able to relax, except for the breeding stock of course. He asks his oracle if there’s any potential magic users in the group, but he’s told there aren’t any with that gift. The human survivors are rounded up.

Cut to the underground leper colony. You see Donna (with no tattoos) talking with some leper called Rand and they’re having a religious discussion. Donna can’t believe Rand still believes in God given everything that’s happened and the debate goes back and forth a bit while you see panels of the leper colony. Now it doesn’t outright say who they are, but you do see some guy writing in a journal as he talks to an old lady. Going to guess this is probably Albert since the journal writing bit is a dead give away. You also see a young man hammering something while a young lady holds the ladder. This might be Joey and Darcy.

But enough of cripples, let’s get back to KZ.

He’s standing on a high railing of a factory speaking to his minions saying how he had a different vision of the world from his Boss and he decided it was worth the risk to betray him. He wanted to see humanity to become what they were destined for, as cattle for the new dominant species.

He’s got humans in cells and breeding them like livestock stating it didn’t take long to send them to the bottom of the food chain. Yep, you got rape, genocide and baby eating all at one convenient location.

He goes on to say, the magic users, the surviving pockets of humanity and the dark lord himself…let ‘em try to take this world back.

“I’ll see the planet destroyed before I give it up to any of them.” - KZ

While KZ’s giving his speech, his Oracle senses some oddity within the factory. It’s brief, but enough that he’s going to have to keep his magic radar on alert. It shows one of the pregnant women in a cell saying to her belly how she’ll protect it and tells it to calm down.

“Well no rest for the wicked, got some reading to do if I’m gonna make all my dreams come true. You coming or you gonna just stare at the food all night?” - KZ to his oracle

Cut to some people in suits we’ve never seen before.

These are the group of dark sorcerers who want to restore the dark lord to power. Despite all their magic power, they’re still not quite brave enough to face KZ directly (Because Lichlords are always more powerful than Demonologists) so they want someone to kill him for them. Cue one of the female wizards saying they got someone in captivity that has a lot of untapped magic power that might be enough to beat KZ and he hates KZ on top of it so he might be the man for the job. Especially since he’s also expendable.

And it shows Dan on a camera sitting in one of their cells.

But enough about these losers, back to KZ

Or his Oracle at least.

Cut to KZ’s oracle who is having a complete shit attack about the visions he’s having. He’s seeing one of those apocalyptic visions about a chosen one who will bring about the end, a guardian who will protect him, horsemen, and just all around bad shit happening to EVERYONE.

KZ meanwhile is practicing his necromancy and getting ready to eat his baby meal when he hear’s Oracle screaming. He rushes over with some zombies and a graken to see what the hell’s going on. The oracle goes on about having a bad vision that could indicate the arrival of someone through a gateway that will undo everything he’s accomplished.

KZ says it seems like a simple solution to find that gate and just keep this person from getting through. The oracle states that it’s too late since that person is already here.

The last page shows this cowboy type figure riding through a gate on a horse. (A pale one of course)

Issue 2

Starts out with KZ going on about how proud he is of what he’s managed to accomplish with the world and then grabs the oracle yelling that now he’s hearing someone’s going to try to take that all away. The oracle says he’s just telling him what he’s seen.

KZ relents and says the vision is useful but annoying and killing his favorite oracle isn’t going to accomplish anything. The oracle goes on to say that this dark rider is coming to protect a chosen child of incredible power. Locate the baby, kill it and the problems are over.

Now the funny thing is, this is a pretty standard fantasy set up plotline in so many storylines, but honestly given the BULLSHIT that they were throwing at us before with this series, going back to the classics isn’t the worst idea.

The next scenes are of this Dark Rider which sort of go on a bit about how in the past he’s travelled from world to another before and how he learned of his destiny there. And now he’s back on earth and how it’s good that he’s back because there’s a lot of cleaning up that needs to be doing since the last time he was here.

Doesn’t specifically say it, but you already can tell by the artwork, that this is the same guy that was trying to kill KZ in the flashback when he was still alive. When KZ went through the gate, so did this guy and he wound up else where and at some point became this Dark Rider.

You also get a scene of the Dark Rider gunning down some large demon creature that’s trying to kill him. His guns morph from his flesh, so he’s technically always armed with them and never runs out of bullets which is probably pretty handy. (Literally)

Cut back to KZ dangling a human (Ted) over a pit of hell hounds saying how ungrateful he is after he took him out of the shitty ruins of a city, has fed him and even hooked him up with some fine babes and he repays this kindness by trying to escape. Ted shouts he can’t take it anymore and points out how they’re forced to make babies and this can’t last before humanity rises up to take back the earth. Well that bit of defiance doesn’t impress KZ so he tosses him to the hell hounds and addresses his oracle who came to ask if he needed him for anything.

Cut to Albert wandering through the leper caves wondering if his journal shit is really all that important. He’s also been hearing voices. During his wandering he falls into a hole where he finds a bunch of symbols carved into one of the walls which he starts to study.

Cut back to KZ again talking to his zombies, saying how his first instinct was to find and kill this chosen kid to make it pay for its insolence, but then he says he’s been thinking about the chosen kid situation and states the kid might be more useful if his power was just guided in the proper direction.

And as a king he’s got a certain responsibility so he wants his minions to find the child and bring it back so he can raise it correctly.

“I’m gonna love that kid as if he were my very own.” - KZ as he looks like he’s wiping a non-existent tear from his mirrored sunglasses

Cut back to that woman talking to her baby and magic blasting a zombie that’s come to collect it for food. Elsewhere the oracle says he keeps sensing a surge in power, but the location is actively hidden from him. KZ says in the old days he probably would have killed the oracle and exclaiming what good was he, but he says he’s more patient nowadays which will be important in raising a family.

He then adds though if he cannot control the child and is unable to use the power it possesses then he’s ending the world himself before he lets anyone else take it from him.

Cut to Dan getting the beginnings of the old Clockwork Orange treatment of indoctrination because even though he agreed to help kill KZ, the cult just doesn’t want him being some loose cannon that isn’t dedicated to their own cause.

Cut to the degenerate trio talking about morning breakfast cereal they ate as kids and other mundane shit, until Stacy suddenly says it’s time for the baby to arrive. I get the impression they probably were doing a bait and switch thing with the "Chosen One" and it wasn't that magic lady's baby at all, it was probably Stacy's. Especially since she was supposed to give birth to a gate opener the first time around.

Finally cut back to KZ amassing his army of the dead and back on a motorcycle (With oracle in a side car) saying

“It’s gonna be a good day oracle. I can feel it. Feel it in my bones.” - KZ

The End

That’s it unfortunately. This was another series that I thought maybe I just missed the comics, but nope, there were only ever two issues.

There obviously were plans for a much bigger story, but I guess by this time the Deadworld fanbase had dried up too much with only a few still interested in the series at all.

This is a shame since the King Zombie comic was looking pretty promising. Too little too late I guess. At least the series somewhat ended on a high note.

The Dead (But not World)

So since we’re more or less done with Deadworld, I figure I might as well talk about its lesser known competitor at the time. Granted it really wasn’t a proper challenger since it wasn’t even that well known, but it’s worth mentioning since it has a common tie to Deadworld, namely the creators.

When Caliber bought Deadworld from Ralph and Stu and Arrow comics they didn’t have anything left other than “Arrow comics” and you really can’t have a comic company if you don’t have any titles to put out. So they created a new zombie comic called The Dead.

Interestingly one of the artists on The Dead would go on to draw a much more successful comic involving the undead called Evil Ernie from Chaos! Comics (Which was probably a better example of a successful Deadworld competitor at the time) The Dead lasted 2 issues before they realized it wasn’t going to sell enough to resurrect the company. So they closed up shop and went to go work for Caliber on the Oz comic and later (ugh) Tattoo.

But more about the company talk later, let’s get to the comic.

So I happened to stumble upon this series once again at that same comic convention where I bumped into Ralph and Stu selling all their old shit that never sold. I saw this comic called The Dead and of course buying all things zombie related, I grabbed it. I was also interested since there were different covers. The regular cover, and one that was apparently so shocking it was in a comic bag and partially covered with cardboard and a warning.

Well gee, it’s pretty obvious which one I was going to buy. Honestly this was a case of not really believing that the covers could be that bad anyway considering some of the early Deadworld covers. I mean I posted some of those on this forum, how bad could these really be?

Well…

Issue 1’s cover would probably rank up there with the gory Deadworld covers I posted up above. Fuck it, I already posted graken tits and nobody’s reading this anyway, but I’ll go ahead and protect the eyes of the impressionable youth who may be out there watching.

Oh my stars!

Certainly sort of understandable that a cover like that might get censored, though the Deadworld ones didn’t for some reason. There’s a lot of factors to consider though, mostly of timing and the comic shop itself.

Deadworld’s edgelord covers came out before this one did. Late 80s. Probably nobody was paying too much attention yet. And even then they weren’t really shoving human tits on the cover on the regular and started toning the gore down a bit on the cover anyway later with the Caliber branding.

By the time The Dead had come out, it was early 90s and there was probably more observance going on with that sort of thing. This one looks a bit more “sexual” than the Deadworld graken tit one. 

The graken just looks like a monster (Which it is) that’s feasting on some carcass. There’s nothing sexual or erotic about it. (Yes, I know I’m sure some freaks got turned on by graken tits, but we’re ignoring those degenerates for moment)

Meanwhile the way the zombie farmer is positioned, he looks like he could be fucking her. His eyes are even shut like he’s just had a major “release” and she’s screaming with her eyes rolled back in “ecstasy.”

Probably complaints about “violence” against women as well.

Oh sure when the Vamp is going around blowing humans and biting their dicks off it’s “hawt” but when some hungry zombie dude sinks his teeth into a nice juicy breast, it’s misogyny all of a sudden. Fucking double standards man.

So if that’s the first issue, what the hell were they going to do for the second? Well let’s just say they topped it, but there wasn’t too much more they could do after that one had there actually been a third issue.

So edgy covers aside, what about the actual story? 

It’s meh.

I mean it’s only two issues, so it didn’t really have time to succeed or fuck up too badly. 

The first issue is basically a group of two families enjoying a cabin vacation with fishing and such. It’s considered to be their “last” trip together since all the kids are getting older and less inclined to want to go. There’s some family conflict and some teenage angst about their future, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Then suddenly zombies show up and start killing people. Now there are apparently smart zombies in this world too. That farmer on the front for example is one of them. Besides biting the mom’s tit off he also shoves his shotgun in the mouth of the dad and blows his brains out.

The comic is pretty gory, so they delivered on that end. As for that infamous tit eating scene on the cover, it’s a full two page spread. Before that, it shows him pinning her down calling her beautiful and saying she reminds him of his Mary Lou. Rips her shirt as he says to take a closer look and grabs a handful of tit up close 

“Ah yesss, just like Mary Lou.” - Zombie Farmer

And when he is biting her, he actually IS positioned between her legs as he’s pinned her down. So yeah, it definitely had that extra sexual tone to it.

So all the adults are dead and all that remain are the kids and teens. They kill a few zombies and escape in the camper but not before the Farmer Zombie manages to shoot the back window out.

After getting far enough away they try to figure out what to do, and decide heading back to civilization to get help is still the first plan of action, unfortunately they soon see in the distance the entire city is on fire.

The zombies in this series seem more malevolent and intelligent in general. Not just the obvious ones either. Even the “dumb” ones tend to actively work together more like insects rather than just a shambling horde or engage in simple tactics when by themselves. 

Issue 2 

Is just more of them trying to adapt to the situation. I should mention there’s 8 of these teens/kids in total. 4 from one family (2 male 2 female), 3 from another 2 male 1 female) and 1 is just some loner friend who had a shitty home life and so he hung out with the families all the time. There’s a bit of arguing of course.

Doesn’t take long for the Farmer Zombie to catch up with them in his own truck and he’s brought along some of his smart buddies, one of which actually throws molotovs at them. They eventually manage to run them off the road causing the zombie vehicle to crash down a cliff. (Farmer probably didn’t die seeing as it looked to be he was going to be an ongoing antagonist)

One of the group gets bitten pretty badly. Later when they head to a gas station, another one of the group gets stabbed in the leg by another zombie, but nobody in the group dies yet.

Then the comic wraps up with some other location where an unseen zombie in a dungeon like room sitting in a chair tells some minions to bring a naked girl forward. He tells her to give him some vital info of where someone is located. She resists at first, but when he points to several knives on the wall and hints at torture, she immediately spills the location. He then thanks her and says now for your reward.

Cue a scream and on the next page is a full page pic of a mouth with a vagina in it will the zombie saying

“And who said brothas don’t like to eat pussy.” - Black Boss Zombie. (Guess he was black, though you couldn’t necessarily tell until then)

I’ll go ahead and mention THIS shot or rather an even more graphic full color one is on the 2nd issue cover. Same thing, black zombie mouth with a torn off pussy in it except now in the background of the picture is a dead woman with her legs spread open and a bloody mess coming from there. Her tits are exposed too, but that’s really a minor thing at this point.

(Though the woman on the cover is a short haired blonde rather than a long haired brunette in the comic, guess they didn’t want to spoil anything)

Well in any case, that was the last comic of not just the series, but of this version of Arrow comics as a company. 

However this is not the end!

Later, after working on the Oz series awhile and (ugh) Tattoo) Ralph and Stu ended up leaving Caliber to bring Arrow Comics back again. They had a little bit better luck this time since they had a few more titles under their belt and even managed to bring their Oz series with them (Which was basically their main bread and butter) One of them decided to bring back The Dead, so now there was a volume 2 of The Dead sort of like there ended up being a volume 2 of Deadworld.

Well unfortunately I only ever saw one issue of this new version of The Dead and I happened to just stumble upon it by chance. Never ever saw any others though, but apparently there were only two other issues before Arrow comics died AGAIN.

So what’s the second volume like?

It’s meh.

Again, there’s just not enough to go on too much to judge if it was going to suck a lot or not. It doesn’t follow any of the old characters which didn’t really matter since we barely followed them before. This one goes a bit more of a traditional zombie route, so you don’t have a bunch of tit tearing or pussy ripping covers like before. 

The comic itself IS still fairly violent, so once again it delivers on that aspect. You get a couple stories in it taking place in completely different locations as far as the zombie situation goes. One is a paramedic in the city, the other is some old guy living in the woods that’s fishing with another nearby group of young adults vacationing in a cabin.

Nothing stands out too much about them, but there was an interesting thing unrelated to the story that was going on.

On the back inside cover, they had almost like a pre-internet version of Kickstarter offer going on. They urged readers if they wanted to support The Dead in a meaningful way, they could send money to fund it. Depending on how much you sent, you could actually appear in the comic.

The highest was 500 which allowed you to be a major character for at least 3 issues. Lower ones included one issue appearance, background appearance, etc. You also could request what type of character you could be like a zombie hunter or even a smart zombie. Finally you could pick how your death would be handled, from a pussy off screen death, to the bloodiest death imaginable. You were also encouraged to send a pic of yourself so the artist could capture your likeness for the comic. 

Nowadays you’d have people demanding to have their character have a waifu in the comic

In any case, while Arrow comics did die a third time, it eventually rose from the grave one more time in the late 2000s before dying its final death. There was a The Dead Omnibus which collected all the comics and added some new material.

I’d probably pick it up if I ever saw it.

That cover is pretty bad. Like not even the gore, it just looks awkwardly drawn and kind of stilted. I'm used to comic book stuff having a lot more fluid and dramatic poses and energy going on.

The proto Kickstarter smacks of desperation, but that would've done some interesting things to struggling indie comics as a whole if the idea had caught on. Probably for the best it did not.

I wonder how many dick pics they received for the kickstarter. In any case, it sounds like anyone who sent $500 got screwed since there weren't even 3 more issues for them to be in.

You're not supposed to bite the whole titty off.

 

Maybe he really loved her.

Deadworld (The Reboot)

Alright, let’s finish it.

As I said, I won’t spend too much time on these, but I’ll still address some highlights.

I only have two graphic novels of the reboot stuff. There actually might be more, but I never saw them and at this point I have no interest in even looking. Still, even the two graphic novels I do have are pretty fucking hefty. One is an Omnibus that’s over 300 pages, so it’s definitely more than enough. The other is a Deadworld Chronicles thing with a lot of one shot short stories (Basically like the old Chronicles were)

It should also be noted that at this point the franchise was all over the place with ownership. Sometimes it was Caliber (Mostly the old reprints) sometimes it was a company called Desperado and others it was another company called IDW. One time it was even one of the more mainstream companies (Image). So there were a lot of people that saw some sort of potential in trying to resurrect this franchise.

So the Chronicles collection is exactly what I said before, just a bunch of one shot stories which don’t really connect to the over all main story. Some of them might not even take place in Deadworld and just happen to be zombie stories (Sort of like Roadkill in that way) They vary in quality. Probably the best one is the one with King Zombie in it (Naturally). Artwork is generally fine.

And that’s about it for that.

Now the Deadworld Omnibus collects several of the comic arcs. Specifically Deadworld’s “Volume 3” a mini-series called Frozen Over and another mini-series called… Slaughterhouse.

Yep, it only took them over 10 years, but it finally came out!

Naturally it was probably changed from the original concept, but the basic idea is there.

So given that this is a straight up reboot, it throws out all the shit that happened and restarts from scratch.

So you get the OG gang again of Dan, Mike, John, Joey, Donna and Christina who start out in a school bus like they did before. There are already changes however, first off is crazy old Deake is already with them babbling about his book. There’s also a new priest character who is traveling with them.

The OG gang is also a bit more fleshed out with their backgrounds. (Flashbacks from before, etc)

King Zombie makes an appearance about the same time he did in the original comic (They gave him shorter hair though, which didn’t seem right as he seems like he should always have his big mullet) He sort of start off a bit more powerful in this one, already having grakens and commanding hordes.

The gang has roughly about the same events happening, though slightly extended. The new priest character gets killed so early it was sort of pointless to even have him, well other than a kill scene.

Despite being given a bit more screen time in this incarnation, Christina and Mickey both get killed in the earlier part of the storyline, though in a different manner than before. You win some, you lose some.

The Vamp actually shows up a bit earlier and this time she takes over a hawt black chick’s body. There’s none of her excessive dick sucking/eating or rampant necrophilia in this version. The reboot in general is less edgy.

It all ultimately ends with the remainder of the OG gang getting “rescued” by Bowker and his men in a helicopter like they did before. Bowker also says “More meat for the Slaughterhouse.” So in this version Bowker is working for them rather than Moloch and Renya. (Who aren’t even in this version)

The next story is “Frozen Over” and this is just a different story set in the same world. Takes place in ruined New York city where a group of mostly black survivors are holding out. KZ is trying to find a gate opener and there’s not just conflict with him and the survivors, but also another smart zombie who is seeking the same thing.

KZ ends up winning, but the survivors with the gate opener get away, and KZ ends up going back down south. This one seems to be a version of the whole arc where he goes up to Michigan and you got all those new fuckers like Stacy, Kirk, Albert, etc. None of them ever show up though.

Finally the last bit is Slaughterhouse which catches back up with the old gang. It’s already different considering when Slaughterhouse was originally going to come out, almost all the OG gang were dead and weren’t part of this story.

So this still keeps the basic concept of the Slaughterhouse being the facility where a bunch of unethical doctors are doing experiment shit on people in an effort to figure out the zombie situation and try to combat it.

There’s a lot of journal diary stuff mixed in with the traditional comic pages. Ends with KZ overrunning the place with zombies (Just like Deake warns the doctors he would.)

As for what happened to the OG gang, well Donna got turned into a whore for the soldiers, so it was back to the gang rape for her.

Later on when the Vamp sneaks into the place (In her traditional stripper tattoo body this time) she ends up trying to take over Donna, but something gets fucked and…you guessed it Donna isn’t quite herself anymore. Though when the storyline ends, she isn’t some badass like her (ugh) Tattoo incarnation. She’s more like trying to still combat the Vamp’s voice constantly inside her head.

Dan goes looking for her by the end of the arc. Not much different happens to him.

Speaking of different, holy shit John actually lives in this version! By the end of the arc, he and Joey escape together (Who was in an indoctrination camp to train him to be Slaughterhouse Youth or something).

Poor Mike becomes a test subject and gets infected with leporsy. Lol. The dude always gets tortured before ultimately dying. Though obviously what happens with him is a nod to that leper arc in the old series.

Oh Deadkiller pops up too, but since he doesn’t have any extra character development in this reboot like he sort of did in the old version, his arrival to the slaughterhouse is basically just him being a man on a vengeance mission. Well I suppose that’s pretty much what he was anyway.

Finally KZ gets the magic book he was looking for and it says he may now have the tool to finally subjugate the world.

Overall the reboot really isn’t bad. They tried to stick to the original shit while ignoring some of the terrible shit that just splinted the story so much.

Okay, that’s it, for realsies this time. I don’t have anymore Deadworld shit to go over.

“So until next time, GO PLAY IN THE STREET!” - KZ’s sign off for the letters page

Damn it, I can't believe they killed the mullet. Was any other character as universally beloved?