We Are The Walking Dead: Crossed: Badlands #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the (few) comics of 12/26/2012 before the comic store opens with this week’s new books…

In the annals of zombie fiction, each imprint or subgenre meets a particular literary need. The Walking Dead allows Robert Kirkman to address the long-term effects of constant stress with no civilization on individuals of different types. George Romero uses his Night of The Living Dead stories to satire human pack behavior, such as mass consumerism, blind obedience to the military / industrial complex, and the compulsion to record life rather than living it.

And Avatar Comics’s Crossed: Badlands is generally here so comic creators can write and draw the most depraved and twisted shit they can possibly imagine.

I’m not kidding. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows created, in their initial run of Crossed, a world where the “zombies” want to eat you, sure… but only after they fuck your holes, stab a few new holes and then fuck them, and then do the same to your friends, family, vague acquaintances and household pets, all in front of you if possible. And subsequent creators playing in the Crossed world have generally embraced this concept with both hands; David Lapham’s last two arcs in Crossed: Badlands revolved around a cowardly teenager who only finds his courage after mistakenly blowing away a teenaged girl he believed to be a zombie (and then fucking her), and then a literary salon that models itself on the old Hellfire Club… until they meet the Crossed, who show them what sexual adventurism really means, by way of the Zombie Cleveland Steamer (where you lie under a glass coffee table while a Crossed rips out your colon, takes it to Cleveland and then dorks it).

Crossed: Badlands is historically the place to go to produce the kind of stories that would get you a no-questions-asked Thorazine prescription if you told it to a psychiatric professional: fun if you like that sort of thing (and I usually do), but not where you look for social commentary or characterization beyond, “people sure do suck, don’t they?” So imagine my surprise when writer Si Spurrier and artist Raulo Caceres turned in a two-part arc about two damaged people, together for the wrong reasons and separated by the Crossed outbreak and their own selfishness, doomed to repeat their destructive cycle. This is a good one. Gross and intense, but good.

Crossed: Badlands #20 is part two of the story of Serena, a metropolitan detective working the organized crime beat, and Mattias, the Russian Mafia enforcer she was once in love with. Oh yeah – Mattias is also afflicted with the Crossed virus. Throw on top of that that the city is in ruins, overrun by the Crossed, Serena is trapped at the police station, and she just knows that Mattias is coming. For her. Despite the virus, that normally turns the afflicted into singleminded rape, murder and cannibalism machines. She has no reason for thinking this… but she’s right.

If you’re reading Crossed: Badlands, you more than likely have a taste for gore and extreme violence, and the issue delivers on that. We get Crossed fighting Crossed, with all the attendant bludgeoning, stabbing, and dog rape (yeah, you read that right) you’d expect from a standard issue of Crossed. Further, you get enough deplorable human behavior to make you question whether we, as a race of animals, deserve to continue walking the Earth. Let’s just say that, when we consider Serena and Mattias, we’re not talking Romeo and Juliet here. These are not star-crossed innocent lovers caught in circumstances beyond their control; these people have hurt each other. Serena used her relationship with Mattias to get close to his mafia boss and further her career – thus endangering his life –  and Mattias? Well, let’s remember that the guy is a born mob enforcer, and he doesn’t take the news of Serena’s betrayal well… which is my first massive understatement of the new year. Let’s just say that if there is a human being whose reprehensible actions calls for a retribution of living in horror for the rest of his life? It’s Mattias.

So where the rubber hits the road, yes: this is an issue of Crossed: Badlands with all the elements that are likely to keep fans satisfied. But it’s what’s under the hood that got me really excited about an issue of Crossed: Badlands for the first time in a while. Spurrier uses the framework of a zombie story the way it should be used: as an extreme situation in which to consider day-to-day human behavior. Yes, Serena’s and Mattias’s situation, pre and post apocalypse, is over-the-top, and the nature of their circling each other is not something relatable to Joe Blow unless he’s found himself bitten by a stumbling Aunt Sarah for reasons unrelated to Alabama Slammers.

However, once you cut through the zombies and the violence and the organized crime vs. police angles, what we have here is a story about two people who in no way should be together in the first place. They are wrong for each other, they can’t see it, and not all of the romantic gestures or grand allusions to romances in great literature is going to change the fact that, if they remain together, they will hurt each other. And yet, despite the damage they have done to each other, Mattias keeps coming back, and worse: Serena keeps waiting for him. And sure, some of that behavior is, on the surface, wrapped up in the unique circumstances of the Crossed apocalypse… but how many times have you had a couple over for dinner, and after they leave, you turn to your partner and say, “One of them is gonna destroy the other in the divorce”? Sure, this is a zombie story, but the engine driving it is a human tragedy about two people who can’t stop hurting each other, and given one chance to stop, they flinch… and doom each other to a cycle of emotional and physical violence that they are unable to stop. It’s damn affecting, and better than Crossed: Badlands, a book I normally like, usually gets.

Caceres turns in a solid art job on the book, and proves himself a good match for an extreme horror comic (a job that probably isn’t for everybody). A good Crossed story needs to turn on a dime from raw displays of human emotion to buckets of gore and imaginative uses of sex organs on the unwilling, inanimate and everything in between, and Caceres delivers that in spades. When focused on Serena, be she barricaded in her office or in flashback, Caceres captures what he’s feeling on her face, as he does with Mattias… although rage is pretty much all Caceres is called upon to stick on his mug. Caceres also draws human-looking figures in a fine line, alhough he uses a lot of parallel lines to indicate shadow, which is sometimes distracting considering that, being a horror story, almost everything is in shadow. But that use of fine detail helps in the zombie scenes, where Caceres captures every drop of blood and loop of viscera. There are a couple of times where Caceres tries to stylize his panel layout, one of which (a late page where he uses the disgusting aftermath of violent acts to acts as panel borders) worked beautifully, and another (where his tries to use the wires from a taser to frame the page, which is clever but for the fact that he makes the wires twist weirdly to accomplish the effect, making me wonder where they were going and winding up being distracting), well, didn’t. But overall, his style is a good match for a gory zombie story.

Crossed: Badlands #20 isn’t for everybody. It is gory as hell, extremely violent, and at one point or another, its protagonists are reprehensible swine who deserve for at least some bad things to happen to them. But it is about something else entirely, in the way that the best zombie fiction always is. And if you can force your way past the extreme zombie violence, you’ll find a truly human tragedy. Spurrier and Caceres have turned in a zombie story that deserves to stand with the best horror parables. I highly recommend picking this up (as well as issue 19 )… if you can stomach it.