So, this is it : no more set-up, build-up, dust-up, or even cover-up : with George Romero’s Empire Of The Dead : Act Three #5, the father of the modern (and, heck, post-modern) zombie genre brings his fifteen-issue four-color epic to a close. Goodbye, Paul Barnum. Goodbye, Dr. Penny Jones. Goodbye, Mayor Chandrake. Goodbye, Jo. And, most especially, goodbye, Xavier.
Does everyone get a happy ending? I suppose that would be telling, and since dishing out overly-specific “spoilers” isn’t my stock in trade, I’ll just say this much — the story reaches what I’m sure most folks (myself included) would call a decent conclusion, but there’s a lot left hanging, which is especially strange considering that this final installment almost feels more like an epilogue than anything else.
Please allow me to explain since you, dear reader, deserve at least that much : a good number of plotlines actually wrapped themselves up last issue (the aerial bombardment of New York, the fall of the vampire ruling class, the daring raid on the Federal Reserve, the final fate of characters like Dixie Peach and Lilith), so the only remaining order of business here is for Paul, Penny, and Xavier to rescue “street urchin” Joe and the other kids from the “blood farm” they’ve been shipped to that was discovered by Detective Perez. Which they do in rather spectacular fashion thanks to an all-out invasion courtesy of an army of zombies that has bused in specifically for the occasion. It’s fun, it’s action-packed, it’s well-illustrated by Andrea Mutti with help from inker Roberto Poggi, and Romero’s script is a reasonably compelling little page-turner. But —-
There’s no polite way to get around this, so I’ll just say it : you folks out there who have been “trade-waiting” this series definitely made the right choice, because this is really the second part of a two-part finale that feels truncated in both directions when read individually, but will feel much more seamless when taken as a whole.
That’s hardly a crime, of course — in fact, one could argue that it’s standard operating procedure in modern comics for the monthly “singles” to feel like disjointed segments of a larger whole (look no further than Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s celebrated current run on Batman for perhaps the best evidence of this “trend”) — but for the seven-thousand-or-so of us that actually have been reliably plunking down $3.99 month-in, month-out for this series, it does rather show us up as, well — suckers.
The other semi-glaring weakness when looking at the series as a whole is that some intriguing ideas that were dropped in here and there along the way appear to have been given the “one-and-done” treatment. It was strongly intimated, for instance, that Barnum might be a vampire himself, but that was never picked up on again, nor do we get any sort of conclusion to Detective Perez’s storyline (well, okay, we do, but he doesn’t seem to be around for it, which is odd, to say the least). So it’s not like everything is wrapped up nice and tidy with a bow here. Most of the big stuff does get a chance to reach the finish line, but some minor to semi-major details are left dangling. So be prepared for that.
Hopefully the forthcoming-at-some-point-here here TV series will address those issues, sure, but it would have been nice to see everything that was brought up in the comic be addressed by the comic before the curtain (prematurely) fell on it, ya know what I’m sayin’?
All in all, then, this isn’t so much an unsatisfying conclusion as it is an incomplete one (even though logically speaking, I suppose, the two should go hand-in-hand). I like the spot where Romero leaves most of his characters (be on the lookout for a really nifty twist involving Mayor Chandrake), and the final page is uncharacteristically optimistic, so in the end our guy George, Mr. Mutti, Mr. Poggi, and cover artist extraordinaire Francesco Mattina have my thanks. I was hoping for a perfect finale, of course, as one always does, but hey, good enough is — well, good enough. And this was certainly that.
Through the Shattered Lens 