Review: Savage Brothers Deluxe Edition

Savage Brothers Deluxe Edition by Andrew Cosby
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve mostly avoided the whole zombie thing. It’s not a philosophical aversion, just an aesthetic one. The Walking Dead looks tempting, but it’s so long and, as I understand it, so fraught with death and near-death, that I don’t think I quite have the patience to see how it plays with ideas of human nature and the flimsiness of what we call civilization.

Still, this one was only one dollar – one dollar! – and it has bright, fun illustrations, so how could I pass it up.

The premise here is pretty funny, though I acknowledge my limited experience of the genre may make it more novel to me than to most: Dale and Otis are two low-life entrepreneurs filling a niche in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead walk and frogs fall from the sky. If your loved one has been turned into a zombie, they’ll go put him (or her) down for good. That’ll give you piece of mind, and it’ll keep them stocked with Schlitz beer.

And that is more or less where this peaks.

There’s a story that follows – they draw a case that brings them into conflict with a severed-head-in-a-jar who’s planning some assault on what’s left of humanity – and they run into a too-predictable ally in a one-time pre-med student/stripper who outclasses them as a fighter and a thinker (and yet who, inexplicably, was about to be sacrificed to the head). But I never found myself grabbed by it. I wanted more Schlitz and less apocalypse, but where’s the sustained story in that?

The good news is that the illustrations are as over-the-top as the premise and what there is of this goes down easy. Still, even though there’s a volume two, I’m probably done. As fun as this is in its opening pages, it’s predictable right away. The next volume would have to be as cheap as this one for me to give it a thought.


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