Ryder On The Storm #1
Written By: David Hine
Art By: Wayne Nichols
Cover Art: Francesco “Matt” Mattina
Price: $1.00
Publisher: Radical Publishing
Release date: July 27, 2010

When it comes to comics, I am a huge fan of non-superhero books, I love comics that have normal characters in them. Ryder On The Storm is one of these books that grabbed my attention at the beginning and never let go until the sudden ending.

The book starts off with a woman in a towel walking through a trashed apartment to a telephone with a whining noise in the background. She calls Ryder, a private detective with his own agency, Ryder Investigations. While she is on the phone the panels cut to a shot where we see a lot of blood and then we see a man’s body covered in blood with holes in his head, in his hand’s he’s holding a power drill and there’s pills right by him.

FVZA #1-2
Written by David Hine
Conceived by Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson
Illustrated by Roy Allen Martinez
Painted by Kinsun Loh and Jerry Cho
Lettered by Richard Starkings and ComicCrafts’ Jimmy Betancourt
Radical Publishers
Release date: December 2009

Alternate histories are always a fun concept to play with in fiction. Imagining a world where the Axis won WW2 like Philip K. Dick’s Man in a High Castle, or Allan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s Victorian speculative and adventure fiction comics The League of Extraordinary Gentleman are great exercises in creative speculation.

Radical Comics, writer David Hine, and artist Roy Allen Martinez brings forward their own altered world where vampires and zombies are very real, and their presence has permanently altered the history of the human race in FVZA. The FVZA, or the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, was assembled to hunt down and destroy the infected. When a working vampire vaccine was discovered in the 1960s, President Kennedy announced that the FVZA was to be disbanded. A former scientist and operative of the FVZA has isolated and trained his granddaughter and grandson to take up the battle if the undead return. When a surviving vampire plans to overthrow the human rule and create the United Vampire States of America, the FVZA is reformed to tackle the emerging menace.