A review by xterminal
Bogus Dead by K. Thor Jensen, John Connolly, Paul Lyons, Dan Zettwoch, Mr. Mike, James Kochalka, Chris Cilla, Ezra Claverie, Jim Mafood, Adrian Todd Webb, Lee Kennedy, Dave Kiersh, Kevin Huizenga, Danno, Jason X-12, Mark Cunningham, Mark Early, Ariel Bordeaux, Gabrielle Bell, Zak Sally, Souther Salazar, Jeff Wilson, Ted May, Robyn Chapman, David Lasky, Jason Toon, Jannelle Hessig, Graham Annable, Jake Austen, Jerome Gaynor, Megan Kelso, Matt Schultz, Leela Corman, Jenny Zervakis, Jennifer Daydreamer, Jeremy Wabiszczewicz, Erik Farseth, Eli Bishop, Tom Hart, Anchovy Sciarrino
3.0
Jerome Gaynor (ed.), Bogus Dead (Alternative Comics, 2002)
I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Bogus Dead for a few years now, so when I saw one at my local Half Price Books a couple of days ago, I snapped it up. (My library's catalog still swears they have a copy, but no one seems to be able to find it. This is not an uncommon thing with my library.) It's been long enough that I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I loved the idea—a bunch of graphic novelists giving short-short takes on the zombie phenomenon. And in some cases, I love the execution. You have to expect with anthologies that there's going to be some variation in the quality of the submissions, and such is the case here, but the best of them are truly wonderful. You'll never see bad work from Kevin Huizenga, for example, and Ariel Bordeaux turns in a piece that's all kinds of fun. If the entire book had been as good as those, it would have been a shoo-in for my best reads of the year. They're not, of course, but there's nothing here that's out-and-out bad. Zombie otaku will probably nitpick at some of the pieces of canon that get shoved to the side, especially in the opening story, but it's all in good fun. ***
I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Bogus Dead for a few years now, so when I saw one at my local Half Price Books a couple of days ago, I snapped it up. (My library's catalog still swears they have a copy, but no one seems to be able to find it. This is not an uncommon thing with my library.) It's been long enough that I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I loved the idea—a bunch of graphic novelists giving short-short takes on the zombie phenomenon. And in some cases, I love the execution. You have to expect with anthologies that there's going to be some variation in the quality of the submissions, and such is the case here, but the best of them are truly wonderful. You'll never see bad work from Kevin Huizenga, for example, and Ariel Bordeaux turns in a piece that's all kinds of fun. If the entire book had been as good as those, it would have been a shoo-in for my best reads of the year. They're not, of course, but there's nothing here that's out-and-out bad. Zombie otaku will probably nitpick at some of the pieces of canon that get shoved to the side, especially in the opening story, but it's all in good fun. ***