One year ago a polar scientist unearthed a frozen secret from humanity’s distant past, unwittingly setting off a chain of events that leads to where the story picks up, a year later, when the zombie apocalypse happens. Our cast is: a young orphan in Mexico City; a Japanese hitman; an Afghani woman in Kabul; and an American survivalist in Minnesota. Find out their fates and the fate of the world in Year Zero, Volume 1!
Considering how done to death the zombie apocalypse storyline has been in the last twenty years, Benjamin Percy and Ramon Rosanas’ Year Zero surprisingly wasn’t bad.
It definitely helps that there are at least a couple of storylines here that are interesting to follow: Saga Watanabe, the Yakuza hitman gone rogue and hunting down his former employers, and BJ Hool, the fat, probably-on-the-spectrum Minnesotan survivalist looking for love at the end of the world.
I liked how even the zombie apocalypse doesn’t get in the way of Watanabe’s single-minded vengeance as he kills his way through the hordes to get revenge for the death of his beloved. And I enjoyed Hool’s simple search for love that led him to an unexpected new place in his life.
I’m not sure why Percy kept returning to Sara Lemons, the polar scientist, as she didn’t really have a story. She accidentally started the zombie apocalypse and that’s it - it should’ve been done in one sequence at the start, we didn’t need to keep returning to see exactly how it happened. There’s also not much of a story with Daniel Martinez, the Mexican orphan - he just runs around avoiding zombies and that’s it. Very meh.
Fatemah Shah’s story in Kabul was slightly more interesting but not by much - predictable things happen as people become zombies but they get through most of it fine. Fatemah and her group of abused women came off the most out of all the characters as more like ciphers and their goals were vague - they just want out to… somewhere? - so I wasn’t that engaged in their storyline.
Ramon Rosanas’ art is really beautiful and I liked how Lee Loughridge had a different colour palette for each storyline to make them stand out on the page. Kaare Andrews’ covers are fantastic too - this book has an amazing art team.
I’m not sure what the point of those last pages of each issue were where the cause of a famous point in history - the Black Death, the Great Wall’s construction, Jeebus himself - is revealed to be zombie in origin. I guess it’s just Percy being cute? It didn’t really add anything.
A mix of some compelling and some dull storylines with great art throughout, Year Zero, Volume 1 is a decent zombie horror comic and worth a look if you’re a fan of the genre.
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