Over at Slave Labor, Matthew Shepherd and Roy Boney Jr's Dead Eyes Open begins a four-issue miniseries.

It's a zombie book, but with a twist.  Conventionally, your average zombie rises from the dead and sets about violently (if slowly) killing everything in sight and eating its brains.  In this book, the rules are different.  The dead return with exactly the same personality they always had, and in a display of admirable stoicism, promptly set about trying to get back to their everyday routine.

Our hero, John Requin, is a perfectly decent, likeable chap, kind to his family, and still devotedly turning up for work each day as a psychotherapist.  Unfortunately, he's also dead.  And... well, people are starting to notice.  Frankly, he smells a bit.  It doesn't help that the authorities are racing around gleefully blasting zombies' heads off as if they were in a different, and entirely more conventional, story.

Played as a mixture of horror and low-key black comedy, Dead Eyes Open takes this rather neat premise and runs with it very effectively.  The usual rule of thumb with these things is that the audience will accept almost anything as a premise, just as long as you rigidly follow through with the consequences.  Requin and his remarkably supportive wife are nicely rounded characters, solemnly trying to find the most practical way of dealing with the dreadful inconvenience of zombiehood.  With the nagging feeling that phoning the authorities might be a mis-step, Requin is instead experimenting with the idea that eating more protein might help.  One suspects he's wasting his time, but you've got to admire the effort.

Boney's art is perhaps a little rough around the edges, but the storytelling is strong and the acting holds up well.  Despite the book being in black and white, he manages to make Requin look like a particularly well groomed corpse.  It's a style that works for the material, which needs to look a little less slick than a typical genre story.

There surely can't be many more variations on the zombie genre to be done, but Dead Eyes Open has an original spin and carries it out well.  Worth a look.

Rating: A-

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