“Well, that was interesting.”

That was my first thought after reading “The New Deadwardians” I saw zombies and instantly wrote it off as just another zombie story which seems to permeate all of media recently. Yet the horror fan and the vertigo fan in me couldn’t pass it up so I gave it a try.

I was pleasantly surprised. While the book doesn’t have that one moment of “I MUST BUY MORE” like say a “Sweet Tooth” or a “Preacher” has this is the first of Vertigo’s new bunch that really caught me with Saucer County landing just off the mark with me.

The story in this book is its strength and for a book that includes zombies, vampires, and victorian london, the whole thing seems pretty natural. The story doesn’t seem like its trying to pedant to either horror fans or the walking dead fandom like I thought it might. This is a book that has its own story that its going to tell and while the themes are a little tired and drawn out I was thoroughly interested from cover to cover.

The art is this books personality though. The story gives us a very oddly believable world, the art gives us a stylistic view of the world we are given. While the art is not my cup of tea it made the book have a certain clean, pristine feeling which is not something that you normally find in a zombie book and for the prim and proper protagonist (alliteration, gotta love it) this fits and makes the book all the better for it

In Short: while not having a stand out moment that a #1 normally needs to have this books exemplifies what I want from a vertigo book, a story off the beaten path with a unique personality that sets it apart.