The Last Zombie: Before the After #2
Written By Brian Keene
Art by Fred Perry
Tones by Robby Bevard
Cover by Joe Wight
Antarctic Pres
Release Date: November 21, 2012
Cover Price: $3.99

Reviewer bias up front: I’m all about the zombies. I can’t get enough of them. I want it all: books, comics, games, movies, television shows, costumes, races, and pub crawls. I’m all in. However, even with my near blinding infatuation with zombie stories, I can still recognize the good stories from the bad; the originals from the derivatives. Here’s my opening argument: The Last Zombie: Before the After is a damn good comic series regardless of genre. Period.

The Last Zombie is a different breed of zombie book that takes place years after the zombie apocalypse has run its course. Dr. Ian Scott is part of a mission to find out what happened to the FEMA bunker in West Virginia. They lost all contact with the bunker which also housed his fiancée, Jen. Along the journey from Colorado to West Virginia, Ian contracted the zombie virus. He has been secretly injecting himself with the precious, experimental zombie vaccine that the team is transporting to the FEMA bunker. Even with the vaccine, Ian is slowly deteriorating and succumbing to the virus. And Doctor Federman is beginning to piece together Ian’s secret.

Mortifera
Written By Stephan Frost
Art by Sarah Partington
Sea Lion Books
Release Date: November 7, 2012
Cover Price: $2.99

Hundreds of years ago a horde of demons were unleashed upon Europe. The Demonic Plague wreaked all sorts of biblical havoc on the people. This era is better known as the Dark Ages in our history books. An army of humans called the Exturminata was raised to take out the demons. Another group, the Mortifera, also formed to fight back the demon horde. However, they were widely considered heretics given their practice of conversing with the dead and other occulty shit. The combined forces of the Exturminata and Mortifera managed to fight and defeat the demons and, decades later, have become complacent.

The blood of demons is highly valuable in these times. It’s indestructible and, when combined with the proper ritual, can be used to summon a demon to do your bidding. Elias Gregor, the leader of the Mortifera sought to mitigate the dangerous demon blood by storing it in the Demon Keep. Kanisus, the leader of the Demonic Plague, sees an opportunity to take advantage of the humans’ complacency and raids the Keep.

Cyber Force #2
Written By Marc Silvestri and Matt Hawkins
Pencils by Khoi Pham
Inks by Sal Regla
Colors by Sunny Gho
Letters by Troy Peteri
Top Cow Productions, Inc.
Release Date: December 6, 2012
Cover Price: FREE

In the early ’90s, Cyber Force was one of those grim, X-Men derivatives that never quite pulled away from a packed genre. I owned the first issue back in the day, but never opened it. Probably because I thought I was rich. I’d forever ruin my fortunes if I ever smudged the cover with my grimy, mortal fingers. Twenty years later, I really have no clue what happened to that comic. Looking at the price guides, should I ever find it, I could possibly cash it in and for a foot-long sub and a soda.

Now that the get-rich-quick, collector phase of comics is merely a laughable side-note in history, many series born from that era are getting much deserved reboots. This past summer, Matt Hawkins conducted a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to resurrect and re-imagine Cyber Force. He also promised to release the first five-issue story arc for FREE. That’s zero dollars. $0! This innovative utilization of crowd-funding is a concept that every comic fan should embrace. It’s like a movie theater letting you sit in on the first 30 minutes of a movie before asking you to pay to see the rest.

The Book
Written by Erik Hendrix and Michael David Nelson
Art by Amanda Rachels
Colors by Gavin Michelli
Letters by Erik Hendrix
Edited by Amanda Hendrix
Arcana Comics
Release Date: December 2012
Cover Price: $14.95

The Book follows a group of student tourists in Italy who hunt down a DIY travel guide. When they find the book in a small café, one of the tourists discovers that it was stuffed with several pages of instructional text on an ancient ritual called Sanctus Letum, the Holy Death. This ritual allows someone to die, take a sneak-peek at what lies beyond, and come back to life. These ritual pages draw the tourists into the ritual spot of a death cult that believes that Lazarus, from the Bible, witnessed a few things before he was resurrected. Let the satanic rituals, demonic possessions, and gnarly death-making commence!

Creators Erik Hendrix and Michael David Nelson melded their own separate story ideas together to form The Book. Hendrix wanted to write a story about people killing themselves to see what’s in the afterlife. Nelson was toying with the idea of travelers hunting down collaborative, “off the grid” travel guides. The resulting story is a compelling twist on the old possession storyline. The Book is an inverse ghost story where the living want to explore the afterlife and, as a result, bring a little afterlife back with them. It’s a ritualistic twist on the movie Flatliners.

Think Tank, Volume 1
Written by Matt Hawkins
Art by Rahsan Ekedal
Covers by Rahsan Ekedal & Brian Reber
Top Cow Productions, Inc.
Release Date: December 5, 2012
Cover Price: $14.99

I have no qualms about deeming Think Tank one of the best new comic series this year. Think Tank, Volume 1 collects the first four issues and is the perfect spot to catch up on this smartly-written, action-packed series.

Dr. David Loren is a true prodigy-genius type who was recruited to work in a DARPA think tank when he was a naïve 14-year-old senior in high school. At 19, he was granted the elite rank of National Security Asset “” essentially he’s so valuable to the United States government that he can’t live a free life. He graduated with a PhD from Cal Tech and followed up on his agreement to join DARPA. There he dabbled with inventions like mind-reading devices, invisibility suits, and portable EMP bombs.

David is an unabashed slacker, yet even with just a small portion of his attention, he makes almost everyone else look foolishly mortal by comparison. After producing numerous inventions such as the predator drone algorithm and an electronic crowd-control gun that would never jam, he suddenly developed a conscience: he realized that he doesn’t want the blood of innocent people on his hands. David tried to leave his job, only the big wigs at DARPA didn’t much care for his change of heart.