Night Zero (yet another webcomic)

Well, to top off April as Zombie Apocalypse Webcomic review month we have an interesting addition. Night Zero. Night Zero is a photo webcomic done by a group of people in Seattle. It's not as much of a continuous story as it is a series of related stories and vignettes that take place in the same post-apocalyptic Seattle. Part of the inner city has been walled off and survivors are safe there, but the New City is ruled by the mob. There are smaller oases called "speakeasies" outside of the new city, but they aren't necessarily much better. But then again, this is the zombie apocalypse, what were you expecting?

Last Blood (yet another webcomic)

So, sorry about the small review last week. Portal 2 had kind of taken over my life for a week.
So, to make up for it, I present to you Last Blood. This is another zombie apocalypse webcomic, though it's a bit different from the others I've reviewed so far this week.
It takes place about a month after a zombie walks out of the ocean and attacks the people there. (I might be wrong on the timeline... it's been a while since I've actually read the comic.) In that short amount of time, apparently a small group of people in nowhereville America has become the last group of humans on Earth. How do we know that they're the last humans? Some vampires show up and tell them so. You see, the vampires are trying to protect humanity, since if humanity dies out, vampires have no food supply. Oh, it wasn't all the zombies. Apparently there was also a nuclear war, which didn't help matters any, but the long and short of it is that they're a couple of dozen humans with a handful of vampires all holed up in a schoolhouse facing off against millions, if not billions, of zombies.

Portal 2

I just finished the single player story.

Wow...

Just... Wow...


Sorry, my mind is too blown to say anything else.

...

Wow...

Zombie Waffe (also a webcomic)

Edited for corrections... Some explicitly pointed out, others not.

Continuing with the theme (that I hadn't originally intended to start but decided to run with anyway) of zombie apocalypse webcomics, this week's review is Zombie Waffe. Apparently "waffe" means "weapon" in German. No, I don't get it either. Apparently the author, Malin Falch, is Norwegian. Which brings me to the best part of the comic: the translation. This comic, though originally written in German, reads very natural in English. Keep in mind, I am a professional translator and editor, so I keep an eye out for these things, and the fact that Malin is either that good at English or hasn't skimped on getting a good editor for her translations means a lot to me. It's very impressive.
Correction: Apparently Malin does write the comic in English first. Though she does get an editor to help her out. Still, it's very impressive work for a non-native speaker.

As for the rest of the comic... well, there's not much there. The comic has a lot of potential from what I've seen so far, but there are fewer than 60 pages, and most of those have been for building up the background and introducing characters, so there's not much of the story yet.

Dead Winter (a webcomic)

This week, I have another zombie apocalypse webcomic for you. Dead Winter, by Dave Shabet. In many ways Dead Winter is both a counterpoint and a complement to The Zombie Hunters. It is far more stylistic in just about every way possible, yet it deals with many of the same themes of survival and human nature just as seriously.

The Zombie Hunters (a webcomic)

So, I'm a bit of a scholar of zombie apocalypse literature, games, and film. There's something fascinating about the genre. I think it's the very human nature of the storytelling. The problem is that most people misunderstand the genre of the zombie apocalypse and mistake it for any horror movie with zombies in it. Really, few things could be further from the truth... But I could go on and on about that. I actually wrote a 20-page paper on the subject that was presented at a symposium. But a discussion of what the zombie apocalypse is is not the purpose of this review.
Ahem. As I was saying, I enjoy me a good zombie apocalypse, and The Zombie Hunters provides. It's a webcomic started in 2006 by Jenny Romanchuk. It follows the story of a group of zombie hunters. Though the name is slightly misleading. These aren't people who go out and hunt zombies. Actually, they are semi-disposable, second-hand citizens who are used for salvage operations in the uncharted "wastes".

No review this week. Deepest apologies

Yeah, sorry about this. I've been pretty busy finishing up a couple of projects and starting some others. While you probably will never see most of them, some of them you will. One of the bigger things is that I will be joining a start-up professional video games review blog. It's still just starting up, and it's been going through some major overhauls in the past month getting it ready for me and the other new members. Originally it had been a one-man show, but there will be four of us writing for it now. If you've actually been following this blog and decide to check out this other site, then you may notice that some of my reviews over there will look similar. This is not a coincidence. Some, if not all, of my reviews over there will be posted here first in a rough draft kind of form. I make no pretense at saying that this blog here is professional. Like I said in my first post, I started this blog to get me writing. However, this other blog is professional, so the reviews will go through changes and polishing to make them better. I just didn't want anyone to think that some guy with the same name is plagiarizing my reviews. It is the same guy, and they are the same reviews. They'll just be better versions of my reviews.
On a related note, some of the reviews already on this blog and reviews to come will also be re-worked versions on reviews I have done elsewhere. Most of them will be from my college's sci-fi club's forums, but some may be from an old, oooooold blog of mine. I will not link it here, since it was even more of a personal blog than this one is. It's not that I'm trying to hide anything, but I just don't really feel it's relevant to anything here. If you really want to find my old blog, it wont be that hard. So if you see a review here that looks an awful lot like something written at my old blog... well, it is. But that too was written by me, so please don't fear that it might be plagiarism.
Aside from that, I've also been working on a translation of a Spanish role-playing game. Mostly this is for personal use, so I can share the game with my monolingual friends. But if I'm satisfied with it, I may approach the publisher to see if they have any interest in it. They probably won't, but a guy can dream.
That's about it. I'll try and make up for this week's loss by writing an extra review in the coming weeks, but I won't make any promises.