Cold Dead War #2

Cold Dead War #2

Heavy Metal Comics 2021

Written by George C. Romero

Pencilled by German Ponce

Inked by Gabriel Rearte

Coloured by Protobunker

Lettered by Saida Temofonte

The first covert mission begins for The Pacific Pearl, a group of zombie pilots trained to defend American democracy, especially if they have to kill for it. This is the secret history of American combat, and the story of the undead soldiers who fought to keep their nation safe.

As I was getting ready to do this review I picked up the book and got terribly excited as I looked at the cover and went oh yay this that zombie war book. It is always a huge bonus when you look at a book and get completely excited over it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Heavy Metal just keeps putting out books that gets the reader excited the moment they see them because they’ve really become a go-to publishing house high quality storytelling. Romero is heavily influenced by his father and that should come as no surprise considering how he created what we know as the current zombie genre and continues to take that and push the envelope in his own way to bring it to the next level.

I am totally into the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of events unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented beautifully. The character development we see here is phenomenal and the fact that the soldiers who speak and have conversations that we understand, as does the Captain and yet that’s not something which is common. That came as such a surprise to me and I kind of like it since it adds yet another layer to what we see. The pacing is amazing and as it takes us through the pages revealing more and more of the story it just keeps us involved in what’s happening.

The way that we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to grow and evolve is really rather nice to see. To see the team in action as they are now is something crazy good and interesting. How we see everything working together to create the story’s ebb & flow and now it moves the story forward is rendered perfectly.

I am a huge fan of the interiors here. The linework is exquisite and to see the varying weights and techniques that we see utilised in creating this level of quality detail work is extraordinary. We get to see such clean, crisp and beautiful lines here that just blow you away and that the inks on top of the pencils feel so effortless is even more impressive. The composition within the panels are done in such a way that we don’t see a whole lot of backgrounds which is okay i’d like to see more but as it is we get some interesting depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the story. The utilisation of the page layouts and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show such a masterful eye for storytelling. The creativity and imagination that is on display is fabulous though I wish the codpiece on the last page wasn’t there it felt like a forced add-on. The colour work that we see is extremely well rendered. The way we see the various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work show a phenomenal eye for how to utilise colour to its utmost.

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I am super impressed with this book and how it’s able to really push the genre in a different direction than we’re used to seeing. This is cutting edge storytelling that you really do not want to miss out on.