501 Things to do With A Zombie by J.C. Richards and Aaron Waite

My wife showed me this book when we were at the bookstore. We were there with our daughter and she turns into a total nutcase when we’re about to leave. She cries, kicks and yells for me to put her down. Well when my wife showed me this book I had a screaming two-year-old in my arms. I didn’t have much time to look at the book, but I decided to take a chance at it. It looked funny enough and boy was I wrong.

The title basically says the plot of the book, 501 Things to do With a Zombie.

When I first read the title and saw the size of the book I thought there was going to be more to it. To me, having a huge list of 501 things will be a very boring read. When I opened the book and saw a huge list of dumb things to do with a zombie I felt like I just wasted ten bucks. I really don’t like bashing books at all, I want my readers to check out every book I review for themselves, but this one I recommend you don’t bother with.

It’s silly and some things make absolutely no sense. I thought the book would have a few lines for each thing explaining why you would do this with a zombie, but no, it’s just a list. Here are a few examples from the book

67. Ride the subway

137. Run for office

308. Watch NASCAR

494. Watch sunrise

The back blurb is very misleading. What the back says is actually funny. The book should have been written in the blurbs format, but it wasn’t. I honestly felt like the author just wrote this in a few minutes without any thought and found a publisher who would actually publish it.

Some of the things do come accompanied by illustrations and some of those are actually funny. I would have strongly recommended to the author that there should be less things and more illustrations and possibly a few lines explaining why you’d do this with a zombie and not your regular friends. Something else to point out is that some of the things are scratched out with red. Like this for example (the underline was scratched out and the not underlined replaced it)

86. Enter a hot-dog eating contest. Eat dog.

To me that makes no sense. I could go on and on about how this book could have been better but I’ll end here. I give 501 Things to do With a Zombie, 1 Undead Head out of 5.

If you’d like to see for yourself what I’m talking about with this book please use the link to the left and purchase a copy. Remember, only buy it if you have a few bucks to spare. If not, then don’t worry about this one.

Zombie Cop by Jeff Mariotte & Szymon Kudranski

I know that Zombie Comic Book Week is over, but there was one comic that slipped under my radar. I recently have been in contact with a bookstore to put my books on consignment. The rep I’ve been talking too mentioned to me that her husband wrote a zombie comic book. Since we’ve build a great relationship, I told that I would be thrilled to check out the book and write a review.

Joe Mundy is one dedicated cop. After a zombie plague begins to take over the town, Joe finds himself in the middle of it. A small fight involving one of the infected and Joe ends with him bitten and infected. He only has a few days left before he turns completely, but before he does, Joe must finish one last case.

I’m going to be completely honest. I read the first few lines of this comic and the writing really bothered me. It wasn’t believable at all. The story starts with a family hiding inside a building with what notices to be zombies knocking at the door. Quickly, the reader sees that it’s raiders and not zombies. The father/husband’s dialogue during this section is terrible. I wanted to close the book and stop, but I kept going. After the first section, things started getting better. The writing improved greatly and it turned out to be one heck of a story. There were a ton of great action scenes involving Mundy and the zombies. The story did seem to move too quickly at times, but the gore scenes made up for that.

The illustrations by Szymon Kudranski, overall, were okay. It was hard to get a good visual of the characters because they would seem to look different in each image, almost as if there were a few different artists illustrating different sections of the book. I found this to be a distraction to the storyline. The zombies looked awesome though. The gore was drawn to a tee, there were a lot of flying eyeballs though.

I was pleased with Zombie Cop. I did have my issues with it, but overall, it was a fun and entertaining read. I really liked the storyline, it was something different. Mariotte does a good job showing emotion in his characters. He made me believe that Joe Mundy really cared about his final case. I will have to give Zombie Cop, 4 Undead Heads out of 5.

Zombie Cop is available through Amazon. If you would like to support the site and the author, please use the link to the left and buy a copy of this awesome comic.