On The New Deadwardians

      

There’s one shocking, despicable moment to be found in the first issue of Dan Abnett and I.N.J. Culbard’s The New Deadwardians. In fact, it’s one of the most inexplicable and dispiriting things that I’ve come across in a comic for a long, long while, and that's saying something. How much lower, you might ask upon catching sight of this aberration, can DC/Vertigo go? Because, and you’ll no doubt find this as difficult to sympathise with as I do, the cover to The New Deadwardians declares – deep breath, brace yourself – that this is the first of just eight issues. Yet if  ever there was a comic which demanded year upon year of uninterrupted publication, then this is it. Eight issues and nothing more is a scandal.

        

Without wanting to give anything away of the plot itself, much of the book’s strength lies in the way in which its creators have chosen to ignore so many of the givens of modern-era comics storytelling. They’ve presented us with an authoritarian, iniquitously unequal and yet ingenious and resilient society struggling desperately to cope with not one but two Biblically Fortean plagues, and yet they’ve done so in a way which avoids the over-familiar unless it’s been subverted to serve their purpose. Accordingly, the zombies of The New Deadwardians are no less terrifying than we'd expect as they munch away at their living prey, but they’re also a banal given of the cast’s everyday lives. There are procedures to be followed, phrases to be put to use, responses to be politely avoided when dealing with them. The end of the world arrived, it seems, only for the British class system to swallow it (almost) whole.

Abnett and Culbard sidestep the typical narrative affectations of so much of today’s fantastic fiction. They avoid both the melodramatic excesses flavoured by a hard-boiled, cod-Chandleresque world-weariness and the melodramatic excesses flavoured by a sub-Gamainesque whimsy. Instead, they offer a culturally repressed, profoundly private and understated cast whose emotions touch us far more because of what they don't say and do. When some expression of feeling does momentarily crack through their considerable reserve and resolve, it counts with the reader in a way which the typically obvious soap-operatics of  so much of 2012 's genre fiction cannot hope to equal. Less really is the new as well as the old more.

         
Don’t we all tend to try to pretend that a bedrock of routine and reliability still exists even when the very worst of times arrive? We all live in a world which perpetually totters on the abyss for an endless array of reasons, and yet we tend to think of our lives as remarkably ordered and predictable. Abnett's triumph is to suggest but never overstate the alienation and suffering of his characters in this fundamentally traumatised and yet apparently well-ordered alt-Britain, and it's an approach matching restraint with compassion which Culbard’s art works wonderfully well to compliment, creating a world in which horror is ever-present and yet almost entirely taken-for-granted too. It’s impossible not to care for these people because their experience of the world, for all its difference, is remarkably similar to that of our own.  

        

You might not be sold on the premise of a world in which the upper orders have by necessity embraced vampirism in order to survive a society-fracturing plague of zombies. But perhaps you might be interested in a series concerned with how we strive to create the illusion of normality even during the most unstable and challenging of circumstances, and with how we try to cope when denial and catastrophe collide.

        

A comic-book police procedural, a social drama concerned with class and family and authority, a rich alternative-Earth created from a compelling collision of history and horror, an untypically smart use of the supposedly idyllic and yet politically tumultuous years before the First World War, a very British chiller with welcome echoes of Brian Stableford and Kim Newman; The New Deadwardians feels like nothing less than a classic comic-book from the very off. It’s an achievement made all the more impressive because, save us, it’s concerned with yet more vampires and yet more zombies. To create something this inventive, unsettling and touching out of the beaching pop-culture obsession with the undead is a considerable achievement. 

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