‘DC Horror Presents: Sgt. Rock vs. the Army of the Dead #1’ Review
Written by Bruce Campbell | Art by Eduardo Risso | Published by DC Comics
This is one of those projects that surely started with just a tagline. Something like ‘what if we had Sgt Rock fight Nazi zombies, and have Bruce Campbell write it.’ That’s ‘take my money’ territory right there, and personally I couldn’t pass this one up. Throw in the fantastic Eduardo Risso as artist, and we seem to have a winner. Yes, Nazi’s are old hat in comic book circles, and yes, zombies have seen quite a lot of the spotlight in recent times, but Bruce Campbell has that x-factor that I think gives a fresh spin on anything. A zany, what-the-hell spin.
Let’s take a look.
It’s Berlin, 1944, and the war is going pretty badly for a certain Adolf Hitler. This isn’t quite the Hitler we know, however, as his response to receiving bad news in his bunker is to rip the head off the person delivering it. Literally. He also orders a doctor to fully implement his regeneration plan to get him more soldiers. That doesn’t sound good. We find out just how not good that is by shifting to the outskirts of Berlin, where some U.S Army soldiers suddenly discover that they can’t kill the advancing Nazi soldiers, no matter how many rounds they fire. Why? They are already dead.
Time for the hero the book to make an appearance I’d say, and Master Sergeant Frank Rock doesn’t disappoint. He’s pulled off routine duties, told to assemble Easy Company, and issued with a Level 9 Assignment. Not sure what that is exactly but it sounds particularly important, so I’m assuming it is. Actually, we know what that is, it’s the fact the Allies have just discovered the Nazis have zombies. They recovered a dead (dead dead?) zombie and have analysed it. The Nazis have managed to concoct a serum that aids the regeneration of tissue and combined that with an electronic brain implant that reactivates the central nervous system. Yep, that sounds like the Nazis alright.
So, Easy Company now know their mission. To target and destroy the facilities both producing the drugs the Nazis need, and the ones processing the steady supply of corpses. Oh, and not forgetting the central morgue. That’ll be fun. They’ll not be going empty-handed of course, so they’ll be taking some cutting-edge tech with them. Hand-held communication radios, infra-red technology, thermal imaging. Remember, this is 1944, so these seem like black magic. However, before they can take off for their mission, a closer-to-home problem crops up, and it takes the whole of Easy Company to take down just one zombie. The Nazis seem to have hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Things just got very real.
If I’m being brutally honest, I was a little disappointed by this. There is stuff to like of course, but it’s not really a Sgt. Rock story. It could be a generic zombie Nazi story from the old Weird War Tales book DC used to publish if anything. The premise is fine, if a little derivative, but there’s a whole lot of explanation going on with little real progression. It lacked a little ‘oomph,’ for want of a better word. The pacing feels a little off, things stretched out just a tad too far. It’s certainly readable, but also lacks Campbell’s trademark wit and tongue-in-cheek approach he normally employs. Risso’s art is nice, if a little bland. He seems to not enjoy drawing backgrounds, going by a lot of the panels here. The colourist certainly earned their money, making those blank spaces look less obvious.
It’s a first issue, so we need to make allowances for that, but I do wonder if Campbell has enough in his bag of tricks to pull this off. We certainly need a bigger role for Sgt. Rock himself, otherwise what’s the point?
Solid schlock but lacking that something extra.
