Monday, July 6, 2009

Review: Tomb of Bloke


From Virus Comix comes Tomb of Bloke, which originally appeared as an online comic on Myspace. The print version has been reworked and expanded for your reading pleasure.


This book is an indy labor of love by artist Ju Gomez and writer Jason "Bloke" Crawley. ToB features a color cover and B&W interior, and the book is priced affordably at a measly $2.99 a shot. How can you pass that up?!


As for content, ToB is your basic "zombies take over the world" concept. The twist presented to us in this book, is that we see much of the action from the perspective of "Bloke," a recently reanimated zombie who retains some human thought process and emotions. I found the idea to be refreshing. As for nuts and bolts writing, Crawley does a good job at keeping the flow of the story going, and I for one GREATLY appreciate his use of narrative text panels to help tell the story. I think with further practice and polish, he has potential to be a very good horror comic author.


Concerning the art, Ju Gomez is quite good. His work is much better than many, many indy illustrators out there. I don't think you can find any faults with his approach. Really, the only downside on the visuals was that Ju uses lots of heavy darkness in his linework (not a problem - I like "heavy/dark") and somewhere along the production line it tended to translate poorly in a couple panels, blurring detail or making it hard to follow certain actions. Looks more like a process problem, and overall does not take much away from this book.


I say, if you want to support good, horror-loving indy creators like these guys, then you had better not let this one slip passed...


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