Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN num: 9781598164343
ISBN number: 1598164341
Label: TokyoPop
Manufacturer: TokyoPop
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: March 07, 2006
Publishing house: TokyoPop
Release Date: March 07, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 764548
Studio: TokyoPop
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Product Description:
Big-hearted volunteer worker by day, unruly rocker by night, Rylie is one of the most-liked residents in the small island-town of Buffalora. When she sets her sights on Naomi, the new girl in town, love is definitely in the air. Unfortunately for Rylie, so is a storm, the kind in which nothing good ever happens... Suddenly everyone aged 23 and older diesâ€'and quickly rises from the dead! These flesh-craving zombies seek out the last remnants of youth and hope for society. With death in the air and love on their minds, Rylie and Naomi must make their way through the vast swamplands to salvation...
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Rated by buyers -
I became a huge Ross Campbell fan after reading the Wet Moon series. This short, but sweet, graphic novel paints a beautiful portrait of genuine terror and fear amongst a rise of zombies. Unlike action films, all the scenarios in this novel feel true and are emotionally effective. The emotions of the characters feel real and you feel it right with them. One of my favorite things that Ross does with his comics is that he creates a visual uncomfortable silence to communicate things like tension and attraction. The panels Ross chooses to use without dialogue can set the entire moment for a scene about it happen.
My only criticism of this graphic novel is that there is only one and it ends too soon. This suffers from something I call "Blood: The Last Vampire" syndrome. Something awesome that just ends without any true resolve. I certainly hope he doesn't choose to do that with Wet Moon!
Rated by buyers -
Ross Campbell, The Abandoned (Tokyopop, 2006)
Someone please tell me that a second volume of The Abandoned is on its way, because the ending of the very first one is driving me absolutely nuts. (A quick check of Campbell's website says there is a second volume in the works, but that things are gummed up; I guess the highly-publicized fracas with Tokyopop that resulted in Campbell's leaving the fold is behind it. Someone pick this up pronto!) Conceptually, it's your basic zombie manga-- dead rise, small group of the still-living have to survive both the zombies and each other-- but Campbell has a fantastic sense of pacing that pulls this above the herd and onto the same level as Kirkman's The Walking Dead. Except manga-style, and a whole lot gorier. It's got the same feel to it as Kirkman's series or a Romero film in that the real focus of the story is on the living, breathing human beings and their various petty grievances and futile quests for power, but is closer to the Romero side of things in that Campbell is obviously very fond of his roamers, and gives them a great deal more screen time than one gets in Kirkman. It's the best of both worlds. Highly recommended. Except for that painful ending that has me drooling for the second volume. ****
Rated by buyers 
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It's like a manga (comic book) in the way that the story is told through pictures and very little words. It's interesting, but kinda leaves you thinking WTF?
Rated by buyers 
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Horror fans, get this one at all cost! Beautiful artwork... mostly black, white and grey, but with plenty of blue thrown in the mix which pops off the page. The story rocks, and leaves us with a cliffhanger which should carry into a future volume of The Abandoned. Hell yeah! Get your gore on!
Rated by buyers 
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I'm a fan of graphic storytelling, and more into the zombie genre than the average citizen (from the "classics" of Romero to the new school hilarity of Shaun of the Dead, scariness of 28 Days Later, and depth of The Walking Dead), so I picked this up for a whirl. Campbell is clearly a huge fan of the genre, and the book is chock full of insider references (my own favorite is in the background of a scene in a supermarket, where there's an ad for The Stuff). However, I can't say that I really cared for the book. A large part of the problem is that I didn't find the characters particularly compelling, especially obnoxious the lead character Rylie. They are the "outsiders" in a small Georgia town, variously gay, orphaned, punkish, or whatever. Their relationships are just as two-dimensional as any teen slasher flick, and despite being huge horror movie fans (according to their t-shirts and other paraphernalia) they make the same stupid mistakes as the kids in those films.
The story kicks into gear when a massive storm his the town, and the subsequent morning, everyone except the six or seven teens are zombies. Unfortunately it's never explained why they are spared the fate of the other townspeople, which is a pretty major flaw in the proceedings. Several reviewers claim that anyone over 18 or 21 becomes a zombie, but not only does that not make sense (where are the children, where are the other teenagers?), but is proven untrue in the book itself. For example, at the bottom of page 116 one can clearly see a little zombie girl in a tutu (and on the following panel, she is run into by a truck...). Another possibility is that anyone not part of the "counterculture" is a metaphorically a zombie, and thus is here turned into a true zombie. However, even that hypothesis breaks down later in the book, when we see various punk rock zombies on the attack.
Anyway, the plot proceeds according to type, as Rylie and her band of fellow survivors are slowly whittled down by the superior numbers of zombies. That doesn't really do the artwork and tone justice though, because it's incredibly bleak and gruesome stuff. The artists have devoted fetishistic detail to the particulars of various characters getting ripped apart and eviscerated by zombie hordes. I'm generally a pretty big fan of campy gore in films, however here it's almost disturbingly pornographic -- especially scenes in which unclothed teenage girls are disemboweled and torn limb from limb. Such scenes are made more vivid by the excellent mix of blue and grey ink throughout. This allows Campbell to both highlight lone elements in a panel (for example, bright blue hair or bright blue underwear), and create nicely nuanced browns and shadings of gloom.
Ultimately Campbell keeps things bleak and despairing, as the least likeable characters are the only ones left standing. And it's all left very much unresolved, leading one to believe that the story will continue in a future book. So, if you need closure to your zombie stories, you might want to wait and see if Campbell continue this as a series.
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