Dynamite Entertainment's wildly successful entry into the zombie horror genre is finally collected in its entirety!
The zombie infestation rages unchecked. Only a handful of survivors remain, fighting for their lives against the rising tide of undead mayhem! Will these poor souls survive the perils of an overrun city and find safe haven Alfredo Bay's small coastal town... or has that world died along with most everything else in this post-apocalyptic nightmare?
This gloriously gory compendium of carnage comes with a special introduction by Max Brooks, author of the New York Times bestselling Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z!
Leah and I are now so old that books we wrote a decade ago are coming out in new, special collected editions. Back in 2006 we accepted Dynamite Entertainment's invitation to pitch a full on zombie horror miniseries and Raise the Dead was the result.
Interest in zombies had hit something of a peak at the time and there were lots and lots of comics (and even more films) jumping on the bandwagon, many doing a pretty bad job of it. I have nothing against "fast zombies" (even though they're not technically zombies if you ask me) in their proper place such as 28 Days Later or [REC], but if you want to do zombies properly there are rules. Rules, Goddamnit! At least I thought so at the time.
The zombies in Raise the Dead, and the follow-up series (which Leah and I plotted but which Mike Raicht actually wrote), are for all intents and purposes the same as those from Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). They're not super zombies, they're not talking zombies, they're not kung-fu zombies, they're not learning, tool using underclass zombies that make us wonder if we might, in fact, have been the real zombies all along; they are the slow moving, groaning, flesh hungry, re-animated dead. Okay, they have glowing red eyes too, but that's mostly just because that looks cool AF. Basically, we tried to throw everything we loved about zombie stories into one four issue miniseries... and then we threw a bit more of it into a second one.
I'm still very proud of Raise the Dead. Hugo Petrus did a horrific (in a good way) job on the art, Ivan Nunes gave us those glowing red eyes, and young Simon Bowland worked his usual lettering magic on all those moans groans and flesh rending sound FX. It was a great working with Mike Raicht and Guiu Vilanova of the second arc too - a very new and different experience to what we were used to at the time. And those Arthur Suydam and Sean Phillips covers weren't half bad either.
If you're a fan of George Romero's original Dead trilogy, of films like Braindead, Return of the Living Dead, and Night of the Creeps, then Raise the Dead should be a book for you. It's dark, it's bloody, but there's some humour and fun in there too. We didn't set out to shatter the mould, or re-invent the zombie genre, just to bring the kind of zombie series we wanted to read to comics.
The zombies are coming. And they're hungry. Watch out for those red eyes, burning in the darkness.