Stiffs #3

By Drew Davies, PJ Montgomery, Joseph Glass, Gavin Mitchell, Kirsty Swan

“I can’t believe he ran!”

“Oh, come on! It’s zombies! What did you expect?”

“That’s a good point.”

Have you been preparing for a zombie invasion? What? Why not?! Get to it! Haven’t you been watching that documentary, what’s it called… The Walking Dead?

Stiffs by writers Drew Davies, PJ Montgomery, and Joseph Glass brings in a lot of your common zombie themes… at first, but as each issue progresses you see more and more magical elements coming into the fold. How did everyone not notice the zombies earlier? Perhaps someone who resembles Velma was protecting them? Yeah, probably. Issue #3 fully unleashes these new themes and sets the course for the next two issues of this five-part series to be filled with a lot of crazy fun.

The artist on the series is Gavin Mitchell, and the colors are done by Kirsty Swan. The scenes focus mainly on the characters, with not a whole lot usually going in the background, besides maybe a few zombies stumbling their way towards a crowbar in the face. The story however, provides a lot of characters for Mitchell and Swan to play around with (one of the main characters is a talking monkey… A TALKING MONKEY!)

Through this issue we’re shown a flashback to Don’s (the main character/ not the monkey) first encounter with a zombie, an encounter that goes pretty much according to how anyone else’s would…  not very smooth. It’s in this scene where the writing and art come together really well. It starts off with a little caption “Six months ago” as we see Don screaming for his life, the next panel says “Six months and thirty seconds ago” where Don is just walking along all fine and dandy… but thirty seconds later… “AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!”. In this scene Don’s facial expression throughout the encounter go from terrified to pissed off as he tries to fight away his very first zombie! (Awww). Mitchell and Swan do a great job together as the darkness of the night is lit faintly by a single street light during what is pretty much a frantic battle for survival. Also the zombies look scary… so, like… don’t read this before bed.

Stiffs proves to be a fresh take on the zombie story. The writing is full of humor as well as plenty of horror/fantasy elements as this five-part series just keeps getting bigger.  Also there’s a talking monkey… A TALKING MONKEY!