I had read all 44 pages of FVZA: Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency #1 (Radical Comics) before I began to understand why the comic book existed at all and why it felt like a very solid premise from which a story was being reverse engineered, rather than a story that needed to be told.

That realization didn’t come from the comic book itself sadly, but from an interview with writer David Hine, printed after this first third of the story ends—he was apparently brought in to turn the website fvza.org into a comic book. (This also explains the wonky credits. David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez are the only creators with their names on the cover; on the title page the former is credited as “writer” and the latter as “illustrator,” but there are also two people given a “conceived by” credit and two more people given a “painted by” credit).

The premise is an alternate history of the United States, in which both vampires and zombies are real, and have posed existential threats to the nation since at least the time of the Civil War. Eventually, a federal organization was formed to protect the country from these two supernatural menaces. At present, they’ve both been seemingly stamped out, and the agency is in decline, the way that perhaps the Department of Homeland Security would be if the threat of terrorism were somehow almost completely erased.

The sections of the story devoted to telling that alternate history are by far the strongest, even if it’s simply lavishly illustrated exposition, somewhat disconnected from the main characters and the narrative they’re starring in.

It opens with a sexy young woman in leather pointing a gun at her grandfather, and then flashes back to tell how they got in that position. The old man is a former member of the FVZA, and he raised his grandchildren to be vampire-slaying, zombie-hunting experts, just in case. It’s a good thing he did too, as neither the threat of vampirism or zombieism was ever completely eradicated, and they’re both  poised to make a comeback.

Why vampires and zombies, instead of just vampires or zombies? What’s the correlation, exactly? I don’t know, and this first issue doesn’t make any real case for an agency dealing with these two specific threats instead of one or the other, or, say, mummies and werewolves.

On the broadest level, the premise is therefore sort of murky, and on the most specific level of the grandfather, his grand children, and the couple of real vampires who bare their fangs in the course of the first issue, the story is generic. But between those two levels, there are interesting bits of background details and world-building, like a youth movement of rebellious goth kids emulating vampires and the government developing vaccines to protect against vampire or zombie infection.

It seems like a fun playground, and the painted art makes these vampires and zombies stand out as exceptionally cool-looking among their brethren currently crowding comics shelves, but thus far the setting outshines the characters and their actions.

That may change in the second two issues of this three-part series, and this Radical offering is a typically great deal (It’s the equivalent of two, 22-page, $2.50 comics in a prestige, spine-having format), but if you’re not already excited by the mention of vampires and/or zombies in the title of a comic, you probably won’t find much of interest here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Caleb's reviews, Radical Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.