Words: Patrick Hickey Jr

Art and Colors: Carl Antonowicz

Letters: Joshua Adams

Publisher: Legacy Comix

There are so many ways to tell a story. You can start at the beginning and make sure the reader know everything that’s going on. You can have a point of view character who learns things as an excuse to teach the reader what is going on. You can do it all as a flashback or memoir and have a different frame for everything.

Or you can just throw all of that out the window and trust that your audience understands the conventions of the genre you’re in and can fill in a lot of the blanks for themselves.

That’s what we have here with Brooklyn Bleeds. An actual new take on the zombie survival genre in a world where I’ve honestly gotten sick of zombie stories.

In an essentially dialog free story Hickey somehow puts us into the mind of a dog and lets us in on all the details that we need to know. Sure, we don’t know the whys or how bads or any specific details. But does that really matter here? I really don’t think so.

What we do know through both Hickey’s writing and the spot on art from Antonowicz is that the dog we’re experiencing this world through has an owner that is a true friend and that when his friend succumbs to whatever is going on it really sucks for both of them. Quite frankly it’s a beautiful example of showing us what’s going on instead of telling us and shoving it in our face to make sure we get it.

It’s not just the writing that makes sure we know everything we need to know about the world. Antonowicz gives us the close up and low down perspective of the dog in a way that quickly lets us know that this is definitely a four legged story that we’re reading. He gets more emotion out of a face that’s covered in enough fur to completely bury my hand in than I see a lot of artists able to get out of a human face.

And the choice to make this black and white? Genius. I don’t know if it was because of the belief that dogs can’t see color1Dogs can certainly see in color, but it’s dichromatic so the color spectrum is a lot smaller than what we see. They make up for it by better sight in low light environments and the ability to see movement further away. And this has been Science Time with Chris. or if it was as an homage to old school horror comics and pulp novels, but this combined with the brown tint of the pages really puts me in the right mindset for the story we’re experiencing here2I showed Patrick this review early because he’s my friend and thus tends to see a lot of stuff early. He told me that it was the letterer Josh Adam’s idea to go with the tint on the pages..

Brooklyn Bleeds is a breath of fresh air in a very over saturated zombie genre. In a time where me seeing a zombie book inevitably gets a reaction of asking why the book needs to exist, Brooklyn Bleeds quickly throws those worries out the window. Let’s be real, this is two friends of mine making this one so I was basically destined to like it, but I truly feel like I would love this one even without that personal connection. By the end this first issue there are still a ton of questions to be answered but I don’t feel like that’s a bad thing here at all.

My only complaint is that you can only pick this one up digitally from Legacy Comix. I just really want a physical copy so I can hand it to friends and see their face as they read it.

Chris Osborne
Latest posts by Chris Osborne (see all)

Footnotes

  • 1
    Dogs can certainly see in color, but it’s dichromatic so the color spectrum is a lot smaller than what we see. They make up for it by better sight in low light environments and the ability to see movement further away. And this has been Science Time with Chris.
  • 2
    I showed Patrick this review early because he’s my friend and thus tends to see a lot of stuff early. He told me that it was the letterer Josh Adam’s idea to go with the tint on the pages.

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