…Braaaaaaaaaaaains!

Ok, so this weekend I didn’t see a new movie. Total sad face. My movie night seems to be becoming a bi-weekly thing cuz there just isn’t much good stuff coming out. There were only 2 movies that I could have been talked into paying to see; Paranormal Activity 2 and Hereafter. I know I didn’t like the first Paranormal Activity but at least I could have had fun harping on it’s high level of crapitude or possibly how much better this one is. But my friend flatout said no to those cuz he wanted to see Jackass 3D. NO, I was not paying money to see that. If I got a free pass or something fine but I was not paying using my money to fund that crap.

Then he was like lets go see that Indian robot movie. I got all excited cuz it was something different and I actually wanted to see it. Then he burst my bubble by letting me know he was kidding and scrapped the whole idea. Boooooooooooo!

Doesn’t it look AWESOME? Who wouldn’t want to see that?

So because of my friend’s lack of vision you get more book reviews! I know you are excited. I had been on a bit of a zombie kick for a while. I read 6 books in a row that were based in the meaty, scary, bloody undead genre. There was something fun, disturbing and entertaining about my journey through the worlds where the dead reek havoc on the living.

“The Walking Dead” books 1 – 4 by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn

As I mentioned in a post all the way back in August I picked up the first 3 books of this series at FanExpo. I went looking for them solely based on the AMC trailer for the up and coming TV mini-series that I am way too excited about (Oct 31, 9 pm, mark your calendars people!). After I found them, I did a quick flip through and it looked totally epic.

I got the books home and they were at the bottom of the pile of other stuff I had gotten and I almost forgot about them. But when I finally got around to cataloging and inputting everything into my database (is my geek showing? how else am I supposed to keep track of all my crap?) there they were, ready to be read and enjoyed.

Rick Grimes is a small town cop. One day his partner Shane and him get into an intense gun battle with a crazed criminal and he is shot. He wakes from a coma in a hospital only to find himself in pain, the place deserted and in shambles. He wonders around trying to find someone, anyone who can help him. He runs across a few “people” but something is very wrong with them. He also comes across a few very disturbing scenes and he knows something horrible has happened. He decides to set out and find his wife and son. Rick finds them, relatively safe, with his partner and a small group of people; taking safety in numbers. They realize where they are isn’t as safe as they thought and they head out to find somewhere more secure.

One thing about this series is that it is heavy. Even in times of levity you can feel the ominous air that surrounds the characters. “The Walking Dead” is dark, brutal, and doesn’t hold anything back. It goes through the spectrum of human emotion in a realistic way not coming off as melodramatic. There is a truth in the way people react as they lose bits of their humanity simply to survive.

Even though it is in black and white the art gets the message across. You can almost smell the rotting corpses as they lumber closer and closer to sink their teeth into your favourite character whom you foolishly got attached to. Like in real life there is no clear hero, no clear villain, and anyone can die at any time.

I devoured those first three books. I couldn’t get enough and had to get the next book immediately. The only reason why I didn’t buy more is because they didn’t have 5 in at the time and, not wanting to miss anything, I didn’t want to tempt myself with the others.

Unfortunately I haven’t made it back to the comic book store in awhile but when I do I will be picking up a couple more issues. Until then the next book satisfied my apparent blood lust.

“Night of the Living Trekkies” By Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall

One day I walked into HMV with Cory to kill some time as we waited for someone else. We walked around and some how ended up by the books. (They sells books now, well for a while really. They started small a couple of years ago with music bios, followed by graphic novels and comic trades, but now they sell all the hip new lit.) I was flipping through “The Truth about Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the Worlds Greatest Human” by Ian Spector and contemplating if i should buy it. How quickly will I get bored with statements like “A cobra once bit Chuck Norris’ leg. After 5 days of excruciating pain , the cobra died”? Just then Cory shoved this gem in my face. The cover alone had me sold. It looked like pure pulp with cross genre fun. Trekkies and zombies? Awesome.

Huston we have a problem. Something strange is happening at the Botany Bay Hotel. A horde is descending on the place. A horde of …da da daaaa…. Trekkies! To the bane of Jim Pike every where he looks there are Klingons, Vulcans, and Borg (oh my). They have descended on the place for GulfCon, an all Trek con that is the biggest one in the south. He took his job as a “glorified bellhop” to get away from responsibility and lose himself in the mundane after serving 2 tours in Afghanistan, not to babysit a bunch of nerds. He used to be one of them but has become disillusioned after what he had been through. But there is something else wrong. He can’t quite put a finger on it but he has a sense for when something is going to go wrong. People are sick, acting a bit weird, and are going missing. After hearing groans coming from the shadows, finding a severed head in a sink, and a frenzied lumbering mass with a blood lust coming for him he puts 2 and 2 together. ZOMBIES! Jim, with a small band of survivors including his sister, her friends, a crying Klingon, and Princess Leia, try to save themselves and possibly humanity.

This is a great book. It is laden with “Star Trek” references, of course. Mainly the original but lots of the movies, “TNG”, with some “DSN”, “Voyager” and even the cartoon. I don’t remember any references from “Enterprise” but I never watched that show anyways, I would watch the opening but then I couldn’t get past the theme song.

This book is also set up like a “Star Trek” movie/episode. Starts off like a normal day, then something odd happens, then there is an epic problem, the hero/captain/crew is in mortal danger, then magically a solution. And a few key things happen like there is a Klingon, a red shirt dies, and because the main characters name is Jim he gets to yell “KAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!” and someone say a “Dammit Jim…” statement. It is very amusing, I believed I laughed out loud at those point.

The book is also very bloody, ya know, because of the zombies. There’s lots of blood smeared all over the place, decapitations, teeth sinking into flesh, disembowelment, the usual zombie behaviour. There is a complete explanation for the undead in this book that gives a bit of a different take on the genre and it works.

One thing I did find tedious about the book was the authors’ incessant need to explain the references. Some one would say something or do something and they would pretty much say that is from such and such episode or such and such movie. I kept thinking, I get it! But even though I kept noticing that it didn’t ruin the story; it added to the camp.

It is a great book for not just “Star Trek” geeks or Zombie nerds but people who like anything fun, exciting, and a bit silly. It is a quick read too for people who aren’t big readers. Plus people liked it soo much they made a book trailer.

Even though it is pretty obvious that the people who made this little trailer never completely read the book it is still pretty entertaining.

“Marvel Zombies” book 1 – Robert Kirkman, Sean Philips, and June Chung

What do I say about “Marvel Zombies”… I don’t know. It is all the beloved superheroes in the Marvel universe zombified. That is all there is to it really. The former heroes join forces to take down and devour any heroes that haven’t been changed.

Apparently this storyline actually started in a “Fantastic Four” issue some time ago and kind of grew into its own thing. I heard about the series a while ago but never really bothered with it. I picked up a copy on sale just so I could see what it was all about. I have to say I wasn’t particularly impressed.

It wasn’t horrible or unreadable. The art is pretty cool, very drippy and fleshy. But it has very little substance. There is a battle, they eat someone, they sit and talk about how bad they feel about eating someone, then they get hungry and it starts over again. There is a background story about Giant-man slowly eating pieces of the still living Black Panther who he has hidden away in his old lab and something about the Acolytes and The Wasp’s head. It is all very lame.

It is possible that because I haven’t read all the back story that I think it is stupid that Wolverine could be changed into a zombie (healing factor. Duh) but I am all very meh about the whole thing. In the future I may possibly get book number 2, either on sale or for free but I would not pay full price for that. I was disappointed because I had heard good things about the series.

Well I hope those book reviews were a good substitute. Hopefully I get to see a new movie soon. I can’t wait for Megamind!

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