Bleeding Hearts #3 – Deniz Camp, Writer; Stipian Morian, Artist; Matt Hollingsworth, Colorist
Ray – 9.5/10
Ray: This continues to be the most inventive zombie thriller in years, for one big reason – it’s the first one where we’re seeing it from both perspectives. In this world, Zombies are intelligent beings with their own language, but they and humans can’t understand each other. Both sound like gibberish. That’s usually fine, because zombies don’t have much interest in humans besides as food, but that’s changing. Our young zombie, Poke, has found an injured woman and her child named Rabbit, and because of his strange condition – a beating heart – he feels compelled to help them. Unfortunately, the woman is terrified of him, and so he has no choice but to essentially fence them in to keep them a secret while he attends the Zombie Council. This is the best set piece of the book so far, a bizarre meeting of the local zombies where their Bizarro-like logic rules the day and affairs usually center around how to get food.
Poke’s confusion and the humans’ primal terror make a very compelling narrative combination, with Rabbit seeming to understand something her mother doesn’t. After all, a mother only has one real purpose in this situation – protecting her child – and she doesn’t have the opportunity to hope in the way a child who only understands part of the world they live in can. And Poke, meanwhile, finds his connection to this family only growing, as he’s eventually convinced to commit a pretty deep betrayal of his fellow zombies in order to give them a better chance at survival. This book is just as bleak and hopeless in places as other zombie thrillers, but it has something that none of them has. It paints this conflict not as a simple story of predators hunting prey, but as a world where two groups whose survival might be incompatible are coexisting. And that’s so relatable that it might be even scarier.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes
