DCeased Review (Tom Taylor, Trevor Hairsine)

Darkseid completes the Anti-Life Equation (again), this time with the twist of adding death to the mix - and inadvertently kickstarts the DC version of Marvel Zombies! Booming Cyborg back to Earth from Apokolips as patient zero, he inadvertently spreads the equation as a techno-organic virus when his system automatically connects to the interwebs so anyone with a smartphone or computer, ie. everyone, gets infected - superheroes too. Who lives, who dies, who cares…

There wasn’t much I thought was any good about Tom Taylor’s DCeased (clever title by the by). Black Canary as a Green Lantern and Batman using the Mister Freeze suit to slow down the virus’ progression in his system were both nice touches. Taylor writes fantastic dialogue for both Green Arrow and John Constantine too.

In fact, by far the only standout parts of the book were Constantine’s scenes and I loved that Darick Robertson drew his introduction. That opening scene in Liverpool is brilliant and the back and forths he has with the surviving characters is perfect:

Mister Miracle: “Are you okay?”
Constantine: “Peachy. Just set me best mate on fire and crashed his car while sitting on his ashes. How’s your day going?”
MM: “My entire planet was destroyed.”
C: “All right. It’s not a competition.”

Other than that it’s predictably tedious. The virus spreads, one hero after another gets infected, oh no what do we gotta do, oh no it’s so and so but zombified, arrgh run run, etc. Such a dull read to watch the same thing happen over and over while the story heads in the only direction these kinds of stories go which is mounting meaningless destruction. I also didn’t like Trevor Hairsine’s wobbly art that showed some of the worst depictions of these characters I’ve ever seen - his Harley in particular is horrendous.

If you’ve read one zombie superheroes book, you’ve read them all and DCeased doesn’t do anything special to grab its audience’s attention - I was bored nearly all the time. Like his popular Injustice series, DCeased is another Tom Taylor title I’m not going to be following beyond the first volume.

The Constantine scenes were so good and different from everything else (nearly everything - the Green Arrow stuff was also similarly great), it felt like it was taken from another book entirely. So I was delighted to find out recently that Taylor/Robertson have actually just launched a separate Hellblazer series on Black Label! So maybe this was a prelude to that or DC/the two creators sensed the magic there too and chose to explore that further - either way, I’m definitely checking out Hellblazer: Rise and Fall #1.