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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Watch Out for the Undead Minotaur, 29 Aug 2008
One evening, I was stumbling around the interweb and came across Australian artist Ashely Wood's website. His paintings and pen and ink work drew me in right away, with their distinctive treatment of nerd/cool stuff like, well, zombies and robots. Like a lot of my friends, I'm generally fans of both (although not to the extent of getting them tattooed on myself, like some people I know...) -- so the concept of the two facing off in a battle for world domination seemed well worth picking up.
I'm not clear what configuration the original series appeared in, but this edition starts with a three part backstory addressing "Which Came First?" -- the zombies or the robots. The gist of it is that some U.S. government scientists built a kind of time-travel/alternate dimension portal, the use of which resulted in a zombie virus coming back to infect earth. Then comes the two-part Zombies vs. Robots storyline. As the global population is wiped out, the robots find the one uninfected baby and aim to clone it to resurrect their human masters (shades of Y: The Last Man here). Alas, the hive intelligence of the zombies has detected the last fresh brain on earth, and it's a battle royale as they seek to break through the robot army to get to it. It's a simple story, but well told, with a good dose of deadpan robot humor. This ends with the last remaining robot "rebooting" the world by launching a nuclear armageddon to wipe out all zombie life. Except that there's this one island of uninfected Amazons... Which introduces the three part Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons. Things get zanier and zanier, what with the Amazon orgies, kung fu, beheadings, and the undead minotaur and all... Good times.
The artwork is very loose and expressive, sometimes almost too much so. Traditional sequential framing is generally absent, or only hinted at, as Wood lets loose on the page. He shifts between ink, watercolor washes, tints, ragged zip-a-tones, and even acrylics from scene to scene, and sometimes within. His zombies are lanky, bestial creatures with nary a remnant of their humanity; his robots are blocky dudes with attitude, and his Amazons are lithe, long-limbed, scantily-clad eye candy. It's geek culture meets fine art -- and for anyone who spent their formative years watching bad '70s and '80s horror and sci-fi flicks, it will strike a chord.
Note: The cover of my copy is different from the image on the Amazon page.
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