Advance Comic Review: The Waking #1

The Waking #1 David Finch Cover

The Waking is an upcoming four-part miniseries from Zenoscope Entertainment. The series is written and created by Raven Gregory, hot off his incredibly successful six-issue miniseries, Escape from Wonderland, being the third and final miniseries in a trilogy that also included Return to Wonderland, and Beyond Wonderland. Known collectively as the Wonderland trilogy, the series was a spin-off title from Zenoscope’s popular Grimm Fairy Tales series, and focused on the characters of Alice Liddle, the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and her teenage daughter, Calie Liddle.

The artwork on The Waking is provided by Vic Drujiniu, with the first issue featuring covers by David Finch and Eric Basaldua and subsequent issues featuring covers by other superstar artists including J. Scott Campbell, Tyler Kirkham, Joe Benitez, Talent Caldwell, Ale Garza, Eric J, and Adriana Melo.

The Story

The Waking #1 Eric Basaldua Cover

The Waking is a crime/horror series about four police detectives who, while investigating two routine murders, discover that the victims of these crimes are coming back from the dead in search of those responsible for taking their lives. Now the detectives are in a race against time to find the source of the recent “awakenings” and will be torn between doing their jobs or allowing the victims to find their own justice. Meanwhile, a father with an incredible ability must choose between avenging his daughter’s death or losing her forever.

The returned dead in the story are not your usual zombie fare though, and as Raven Gregory stated in our recent interview, “These beings are intent on finding those who took their lives and taking their revenge of them. They share much more qualities with how zombies were portrayed in the past as creatures who came back from the dead intent on exacting revenge on those who wronged them. Like the kind of undead you found in tales like Frankenstein, The Monkey’s Paw, EC Comics, and Poe.”.

The first issue of the series isn’t particularly dense in plot, so I’ll save you the full rundown. Instead this issue is mainly focused on introducing us to the key players in the piece, the aforementioned police detectives, and developing their characters.

The first set of partners we meet in the story are Keith and Laurence, who are investigating a strange murder scene when we meet them, where a man has died alone on his livingroom floor, with no sign of a struggle, except for two peculiar puncture wounds behind his ear. Gregory describes Keith as being “[the] wise ass of the group… he’s the first guy at the bar but when shit hits the fan he’s ready to do his job”, and Laurence as being, “the brains of the group. He’s the guy who’s going to figure stuff out”.

The second set of partners consists of Venessa and her unnamed partner (the narrator of the story), who are investigating a hit and run incident. Vanessa hasn’t been on the force for long, and is described as being “still fresh and can look at the world with a naive eye”, and her partner, is described as being “[an] every man, who is close to calling it quits but isn’t so far gone that he’s ready to give up on the world”.

At the close of the story, the partners are unaware of the larger mysteries being played out here. Oblivious to the fact that while the hang out in the bar and talk about their respective cases, the corpses that they send to the mortuary have begun to come back to life.

The issue also features several random appearances by a homeless looking man with a long scraggly beard, who we meet at the very start of the issue, banging on a door in an alleyway, while the young girl from the cover screams for her daddy to save her. While these characters play a very small part in this first issue, mark them well, because I have read the entire series, and can tell you that their roles expand greatly as the series progresses.

The Rating

This series is quite a risk for Raven Gregory in a number of ways. He’s seen huge amounts of success with the Wonderland stories, and could easily have continued down that path, creating follow-on series and Grimm Fairy Tales spin-offs ad infinitum. Instead though, he choose to create an original horror series, and to make things more difficult for himself, instead of milking the current zombie craze, he decided to go back to a much earlier, Gothic horror inspired vision of the undead. Then, instead of opening up on scenes of zombie fueled carnage, he packs the first issue full of character development and plot building.

Does it work for him? Hell yes! I applaud him for actually creating a plot for the story, and well developed characters that you can actually become emotionally invested in. Gregory does a wonderful job on this front, and by the end of this first issue, you find yourself really wanting to know how things turn out for these detectives. So few comic writers bother to do this any more, so when one does, it’s a joy to behold. The dialogue in the comic is also well executed, and the conversations held between the detectives sound like the sorts of conversations that actually people have, rather than just a device to move the plot along.

Vic Drujiniu artwork on the book is very impressive. The copies of the comic that I received were actually in varying states of completing, with some pages just pencilled, some inked, and some coloured, so I can’t speak for the final look of the book, but I really enjoyed what I have seen. Drujiniu has a great sense of composition, and his art has a dark and foreboding look to it that suits the story perfectly. His characters also have a great range of well drawn facial expressions, which with all the character work going on in the plot, is a very important factor. One thing that I didn’t like so much is the over-sexualization of women, which is something I find in a lot of Zenoscope titles. Women always have HUGE breasts, and are often wearing visible thongs and corsets etc. I honestly find it a little unnecessary, as I’m not sure who it’s supposed to appeal to. The only possible target audience I can think of is 15 year old boys!

In summary, The Waking is a brilliant horror series, packing an intriguing and suspenseful story, that harkens back to the Gothic horrors of old. The emphasis of the story is on the characters, which really helps to distinguish and elevate this story above the other hordes of zombie comics out there. Recommended for fans of good horror stories that don’t just fob you off with gore and torture porn.

Rating:

The Waking #1 and #2 have been solicited in the December 2009 issue of Previews Magazine, and will be available in stores on February 3rd and 17th respectively, with each issue costing $3.99 US.

To see our recent interview with Raven Gregory, on The Waking and the end of the Wonderland Trilogy, click here.