…In The First Act – Wait, That’s Not A Gun: Crossed: Badlands #1 Review

In an entertainment market glutted with zombie stories, Crossed has historically distinguished itself more in its methods than in its themes. Under the hood, it’s the same as any half-decent zombie apocalypse tale: we follow small bands of survivors as they struggle to survive in a landscape populated by monsters that feel no fear and are only motivated to kill, with the story focus more on how the experience shapes – or warps – the survivors. However, it performs these standard tasks under a paint job of making those monsters less mindless flesh-eaters and more clever and gleeful rape-you-to-death-with-a-pipe-wrench…ers. Yeah, that’s a word. Or at least, it is now. And if you don’t agree, I have this pipe wrench… but I’m veering off track already.

In Crossed’s initial incarnation by writer Garth Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows a few years ago, that gave Ennis a chance to do a pretty pedestrian zombie tale, only propelled by Burrows’s over-the-top visuals illustrating Ennis’s jet-black sense of humor… provided your idea of larfs includes zombies jacking off on their bullets to make them infectious, or another zombie whipping dudes to death with a horse penis. Later arcs, such as David Lapham’s recent Psychopath, toned down the humor to focus, more conventionally if not any less graphically, on the idea of human monsters in a world overrun by more conventional ones.

This week brought us Crossed: Badlands, the return of the original creative team of Ennis and Burrows, so one would assume a return of the book to an exaggerated, almost darkly slapstick story reminiscent of the original arc. However, while it’s still too early in his miniseries to judge how it will end up, instead we seem to be getting a much more character-driven and subdued story. It feels strange to call a story that includes a zombie using an infant as a blunt projectile weapon “more subdued,” but when it comes to Crossed, these things are relative.

Being a new story arc of Crossed, we meet a new group of survivors to follow. We have Anya, the pregnant one, because ever since Dawn of The Dead having a pregnant character’s a local zombie story statute, and after all: there’s nothing like the collapse of civilization as we know it and watching the slow and defenseless getting picked off by the score to lead you to forget such complex concepts as pulling out. We also meet handyman and former oil rig roughneck John – because the first thing you want to do when the world is overrun by the equivalent of the walking dead is leave your man made island in the middle of the ocean – and Harry. Prince Harry if you’re nasty. Or at least he thinks he’s Prince Harry; it’s left ambiguous… but he can shoot like a Royal Army-trained Prince of The Realm, so let him have his illusions. With my luck, I’ll get stuck in the zombie apocalypse with a 97-pound ballerina who thinks she’s the dude from My Left Foot. But I’m digressing again.

And we meet Ian, our narrator, about whom we know three things:

• He is a former bookstore clerk who is generally persuasive
• He lost his wife in the initial uprising of the Crossed and lost his reason to live, and:
• He has a hand grenade.

Zombie stories are chock-full of characters who’ve lost their will to live, and most of them, like Roger from Dawn of The Dead, go all twitchy and thrill seeking and wind up acting like Superman on a meth binge, or a delusional 97-pound ballerina. But Ian is presented as generally even-keeled, competent and consciously deciding to survive on a day-to-day basis, which is a bit refreshing for a story like this… and the generally subdued nature of the story is as well. And make no mistake, this comic is subdued… for a Crossed story. So yes: there are Crossed wearing human head loincloths, and getting their faces graphically split open with hatchets. And that might be something that would put Glen Mazzara in even AMC’s censors’ doghouse. But considering that this is Crossed, and we’re not seeing anyone horsedicked into a subdural hematoma, it feels restrained, in it’s own way. But there’s restrained, and then there’s Garth Ennis writing Crossed restrained. So yes, Ian feels like an introspective character whose head we can get into… but lest we forget: he has a hand grenade, and a plan. And when it comes to the Crossed, well, it’s like Chekov said: “If you show a horsedick in the first act…”

Burrows’s art is a perfect match for Crossed, mostly because it is Goddamned disturbing. Burrows draws in a generally realistic style: realistic figures, expressive faces, and solid attention to detail, all with a fine ink line that eschews overstylization in favor of detail and realism. This is admirable and exquisite to look at… until you get the the Crossed dude wearing a bowler hat, a pink bra and a screwdriver… and nothing else. Certainly not underpants. And considering this book seems to be set in Ireland, I look at this zombie and can only say: yup; these are my people. However, the realism only serves the book; after all, we are talking about a universe where we have seen a man beat someone to death with a horse dick. If you want any kind of emotional connection to something like that, you need to believe what you are seeing, and Burrows delivers on that front in spades… although based on bowler hat zombie, maybe he delivers more in jacks.

Look: on a good day, Crossed isn’t for everyone. It is extremely violent and graphic, and it has a long history of of making the conscious decision that it is “a zombie story but, y’know… gross.” But Crossed: Badlands is opening up with an entertaining cast of characters, a narrator with a compelling backstory and secret, and Garth Ennis writing the Crossed as slightly less deranged and over the top than usual. All of which points to a more restrained and possibly character-driven story than we’re used to from Ennis’s run on the book. Check it out, if you have the stomach.