On a personal note, where 2024 was a year where my writing work was constantly sabotaged by internet issues, 2025 has become defined by my laptop’s slow death.  Fingers crossed, I can address that in the coming months, but this review is like two months late and I have at least four more I need to write.  I think the pressure had built up so that I kinda exploded a bit, which might explain my long winded (even for me) opening.

It’s probably hard for someone looking back from today to understand how the different things were in the late 20th Century when it comes to zombies in media.  With 28 Days Later in 2002 and the Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004, as well as the rising popularity of the comic series The Walking Dead, starting in 2003, there was a shift that would unleash a flood.  Before that, zombies (specifically the shuffling corpses/infected style undead that began with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead [yes, yes, I know they were in turn inspired by the vampires of Mathison’s I Am Legend…], where they were called ghouls, not zombies, and were not the traditional “Voodoo style”) were a rarity in movies.  There was the holy trilogy of Night, Dawn, and Day of the Dead.  There was the odd, disjointed and uneven, forgotten (sort of…) sequel trilogy starting with the magnificently mad Return of the Living Dead.  You had the wave of often trashy, but very, very occasionally pretty good Italian film-mill productions that came out after Dawn of the Dead was an international hit.  And then a few spotty one-offs, like My Boyfriend’s Back, Night of the Comet or Peter Jackson’s absolutely bonkers masterpiece Dead Alive (aka Braindead), and the indie comic Deadworld.  Finding zombie media was like finding Lovecraftian stuff back then.  There wasn’t very much, and a lot of what was out there was either very difficult to get your hands on, or not very good…or both.  That was the world of 2003, when The Zombie Survival Guide dropped.  From Max Brooks…son of Mel Brooks?!  I was working in a bookstore at the time, and everyone sort of scratched their head when it showed up.  But then the bloody thing turned out to be a fantastically fun read.  A few years later in 2006, he followed it up with World War Z, which was so much better than it had any right to be (not to mention the crackerjack audiobook).  That hit as the wave of zombie media was rising to its peak.  In slightly more contemporary terms, imagine the heady days of Wave 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the build-up to Avengers: Endgame.  Superhero movies were the moment.  Sure there was pushback from the contrarians and the complainers, going on about oversaturation and blah, blah.  But it felt amazing.  Geek culture was in.  The nerds had won.  Huzzah!  Fast forward a few years and where are we now?  That was what happened with zombies in the horror genre.  They hit.  They hit HARD.  And then they very quickly wore out their welcome, so that even avid zombie (media) hunters like myself would roll my eyes when the next walking dead themed project would be announced.  Hell, there was even TV show of The Walking Dead that came out in there and was a pretty big hit…even though I thought it was a steaming pile of turd that started out iffy, and was completely off the rails by the end of its first season.  And when it hit in 2010, zombie fatigue had already settled in my bones. To this day, there are lauded films and TV shows, like Train to Busan or The Last of Us, that I’ve never made any effort to see and simply can’t work up any enthusiasm for.  But what do I know?  

Just as the wave crested, and I was starting to think to myself, “I think things have gotten out of hand,” Max Brooks came back, with artist Ibraim Roberson, with this short graphic novel, Recorded Attacks.  It was a little breath of fresh air in what was just becoming a miasma.  Handled in much the same way as World War Z, we see the history of outbreaks, told in short vignettes.  Beginning in 60,000 BC and moving all the way up to 1992, we are treated to the horrors of the walking dead as the infection rears its hungry head.  It reminds me a little of the real world bubonic plague, which, from my understanding researchers have found evidence of in Europe and Asia that is as much as 5000 years old.  Even though the most famous outbreaks were in the 6th, 14th, and 18th centuries.  Brooks is really good at telling a bigger story by using little moments.  It’s a storytelling technique I’ve always liked, but don’t see used often.  I like that he leaves it up to us to tie the connective strings between the moments.

Roberson’s fantastic grayscale art is excellent.  I love good black & white comic art, especially for Horror stories, and this is really good.  Very realistic, but with just enough cartooning in faces to give them a lot of expression and personality, without looking “cartoony.”  Also, some nasty gore, that seems understated because of the lack of color, but is actually pretty darned graphic.

I’m working on a long-term project to “cull” my bookshelves.  So, I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels and such that I bought years ago.  Sometimes a re-read, sometimes a first read.  And then I’m passing them on to little free libraries, or some such.  But a few survive the cull, and that’s the case with this one.  It’s going back on the shelf.  I really liked it, upon this reread.  Plus, I think it would be marvelous inspiration for some zombie-themed tabletop roleplaying.  I think it’s been long enough since the subgenre was oversaturating the market that I might actually want to dive back into it. I kinda want to run an Egyptians VS Zombies game, now. 

If you are a fan of zombie media, I can’t recommend this highly enough.  It’s definitely worth reading.  It’s short.  It’s not deep.  It’s not going to change your mind about anything.  But it’s really good.  And it’s a great companion to World War Z.

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