You know, the reader isn't often invited to sympathize with the zombie, but that's what The Hunger, the newest offering from Speakeasy Comics, is all about. Torres and Dibari have cooked up a tale that is part zombie comic, part Tarantino-esque crime story and maybe a little bit of dark humor, set against the backdrop of New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Some of the crime elements are a little cliched, but the twist of having a zombie at the center of things gives them a bit of freshness they otherwise might not have, and having the central character narrate from his zombified state is certainly something new. I was also quite pleased by Dibari's artwork, which is reminiscent of One Bad Day's Steve Rolston and Mnemovore's Mike Huddleston.
Torres knows how to grab the reader from the start, and The Hunger #1 really opens strong. Our lead character is covered in blood, talking about hunger beyond anything anyone has experienced, and then we pan over to see some poor guy nailed to a chair and providing the blood decorating the protagonist. Two pages in, and I'm in "yeah? yeah? what happens next?" mode. Torres also knows how to remain unpredictable, as he kills off a couple of characters who seem at first like they're in for a bigger role, and dumps the protagonist into the middle of a problem big enough to actually make being turned into a zombie seem like only a partial problem.
The horror elements of The Hunger are intriguing. The reader is invited to put themselves not in the role of zombie chow, but of the monster who can't control his insatiable hunger for brains. Torres steers away from traditional mindless zombie archetypes and instead makes our lead zombie someone who still retains his memory and most of his faculties, aside from a slavish devotion to the houngan who turned him and a Hulk-like inability to control himself when presented with the right stimulus (in this case, brains). This loss of control, and knowing that you're going to be not only undead but surrounded by death for as long as you unlive, is certainly horrific. However, while this situation is horrific, it's also completely unreal to any reader's experience, and so the feeling one is left with isn't so much horror as a sort of darkly amused feeling and a curiosity to see what will happen next. Torres and Dibari don't really play up the violence as funny the way Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino do in their movies, but neither are they going for a Martin Scorsese visceral reaction, instead straddling that line and mixing a moderately twisted crime narrative into the plot.
These crime elements are, as I noted earlier, not the most original, and we've all seen the powerful crimelord get ripped off and seek revenge even as the cops get involved on the other side, squeezing the protagonist in the middle. However, because of the unusual protagonist, these cliched crime elements gain a little bit of unpredictability, because we don't know how either side will react to their unusual new foe. This genre blend, the crime and horror, is relatively uncommon, and there are elements in common to both genres, most notably tension and sudden violence, that it looks like a pretty good mix so far.
While the story is certainly gripping, I have to admit that a big part of what grabbed me about The Hunger was the work of Chris Dibari and Nick Filardi. Their work really brings the city of New Orleans to life, whether it's the crowds on Bourbon Street or the less-seen back alleys and seedy motel rooms, and there's a general attention to detail on the backgrounds that is impressive. I'm also quite pleased with the style overall, which has a bit of that "cartoony" vibe that can make violent work more palatable, best exemplified by the work of Steve Rolston on One Bad Day and Queen & Country. Dibari does action very well indeed, and the double crosses involved in the caper that sets the whole thing off are fast, brutal and believable, and the same can be said of Charlie's bloodlust attacks. Filardi's colors are also very stylish, with a lot of cool blues for the interior and night scenes and hotter reds and oranges for the action, using the color to set the mood effectively. 8/10
