HMMM

This is a hard one to figure out. Honestly, I’m sure whether or not the reader is supposed to take it very seriously.

DEAD@17 PROTECTORATE #1
Written by Alex Hambyand Drawn by Benjamin Hall
Published by Viper Comics

When last we saw DEAD @17, we had reached the end of the line for heroine Nara Kilday. She sacrificed herself and her immortality so that her best friend Hazy and Hazy’s unborn child could live. Nara’s saga reached over three volumes worth of material, and creator Josh Howard made sure that her story paid off in a satisfying manner befitting the series.

Nara was a very modern heroine, even for a girl resurrected from the dead. There was nothing weak or stereotypical about her as far as the horror genre goes; she was an ass-kicker of the highest order, never a victim, and could at least lay claim to being sort of a proto-feminist figure. Now, however, Howard has stepped aside and allowed someone else to tell a DEAD story, and the series, perhaps by necessity, has taken a complete 180-degree turn in its choice of heroines.

PROTECTORATE introduces us to young Grace, a minister’s daughter who doesn’t realize that her father is involved with some very unpleasant things. The story, set in 1945, adopts a very 40s sensibility in its approach to who she is. Grace is sweet, somewhat naïve, and her ability to survive seems a bit predicated on her ability to find some luck. Oh, and she happens to be a busty blonde girl that spends a decent chunk of the story running around in nothing but a slip of a nightgown.

There was a definitely sexual undertone to Nara’s adventures, but it never felt quite as… salacious as it does here. Hamby’s story seems to be deliberately reaching to remind the reader of a Hammer-era horror flick. That leaves the reader a few questions to address. One, is this the right move?

Certainly, if you’re going to attach the DEAD moniker to another project and play in that universe, you don’t want to keep humping a corpse. You simply must do something a little different, or the readership will grow tired of the property very quickly. The game, then, becomes whether or not you play it tongue-in-cheek, and add an element of cheese to the proceedings as is done here, or you find a different way to introduce Grace (or someone else) as a protagonist. It occurs to me that other avenues, such as making the new girl an 80s pop star (i.e. Debbie Gibson or Tiffany) or perhaps a disco era drug addict might be interesting as well. There are so many directions for the book to go that you could find new ways to play for a long time.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Grace was a safer route to take in keeping the property alive to start. Plenty of readers will be drawn to the snazzy cover of the girl with the big rack running away from zombies in her nightgown, and that might get them over the hump of nervousness about Howard being absent the proceedings. Now, what remains to be seen is if her story plays out as compelling, and if she grows as a protagonist into someone we can really care about the way readers did Nara. And if she can keep interest in the book at a level where even more intriguing heroines come into the mix. It’s a delicate task for a small, but very good, publisher. I’ll be watching very closely.

/Mason