Z-Word, The

Z-Word, The
Released by: Humanoids Inc.
Released on: September 2nd, 2015.
Writer : Jerry Frissen
Art : Guy Davis, Jorge Miguel
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The Z-Word was previously published in six separate volumes as The Zombies That Ate The World. This collected edition, chiming in at over three hundred pages in length, includes everything from those previously released editions as well as a new afterword penned by Claude Ecken.

Chapter 1 - A Domestic Drama In Suburban Hell

In 2064, the world is in bad shape. The government is a mess and zombies are everywhere. Seth McKenna, however, enjoys his life. He lives with his wife Susan and their two kids and things are great… until his father in law, a walking corpse, shows up. The kids keep trying to shoot him and it's just generally awkward and unpleasant. Cremation is illegal so they can't even get rid of 'pop-pop' that way and he's always in the way, even when they try to get a little alone time…

Seth decides to call Karl Neard to deal with the problem. This is what Karl does, much to the dismay of his overbearing mother. Karl shows up, but the zombie is tougher than anyone realizes and after trashing Seth's chair AND his home theater system, well, it's war. And once Seth realizes that Karl can deal with his father in law, well, why not have him take care of his wife?

Chapter 2 - Dead Girl Superstar

Otto Madox is rich. Rich enough that he can indulge in… whatever he wants, really. So when he wants to add to his collection, Karl is savvy enough to take advantage of his situation and his riches. He wants B-movie zombie queen Franka Kozik, a horror movie actress, and Karl and his sister Maggie head out to the cemetery to check her out, having an in-depth conversation about assholes (literally) along the way.

They dig her up, throw her in the trunk and delivers her to Otto and, well, reflexes are reflexes, right?

Chapter 3 - Terminal Boredom

News reports of Franka Kozik are all over the TV, and a trio of zombie punks is trying to watch in an electronics store. They get the boot but decide to head elsewhere to have their fun. Cut to a married couple, Nick and Laurie, wondering aloud if Laurie's mother is the one making the strange noises in their bathroom in the middle of the night.

Laurie checks in on mom while Nick watches TV, unaware that the three corpses are outside bickering amongst themselves as to the best way to freak out the living inside. When their groans wake Nick up, he takes matters into his own hands, which in turn wakes up his mother in law and… well, Nick figures out a way to solve both problems at the same time.

Chapter 4 - Enter The Belgian

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Coleman is making a TV appearance to talk about his work rebuilding a powerful dead man named Frank Geneva, a zombie who went on to marry a living woman.

Meanwhile, Karl is enjoying some alone time with a female corpse, the one he recovered from the first chapter (these chapters DO co-relate to one another) when he's interrupted by Maggie. They have to go pick up 'The Belgian' before meeting the mayor but get bitch slapped by their own father on the way out the door. Meanwhile Coleman is kidnapped by a man named 'Hannity' (ha!) - who Karl and Maggie deliver their Belgian to… along with a very specific corpse.

It turns out The Belgian is named Freddy and he's got a thing for Maggie, but Maggie only has eyes for Coleman. Sex leads to violence which leads to a misunderstanding and, well, it just gets messier and crazier from here on out. Cowboys. Rats. Zombies. Misguided affections of an aging mother. A horny zombie dad and a willing zombie girlfriend. Eventually Freddy's 'redeeming qualities' emerge - but will it matter?

Chapter 5 - Getting Nowhere Fast

Freddy and Karl go out for a bite to eat late at night and bitch about their problems. At a nearby table a group of thugs overhear and make fun, which sets Freddy off in a bad way. They've got a new assignment - bring a rich kid named Jamie back to his uncle. They track him down to a stadium where Frank Geneva is appearing and when he brings Jamie out on stage, Freddy storms it and decides to grab what he can when he can.

The grab Jamie and a girl named Nina and split in their car, barely escaping with their lives, and then they drop them off. But there's more to it than that, even if Freddy and Karl would rather talk about girls with big tits.

Chapter 6 - Staring Into The Jaws Of Hell

This review is getting pretty long, right? Four hood goons beat up on a woman they accuse of getting with zombies. They finish up and head out for a drink and of course the subject of their abuse, Lana, comes up. Meanwhile, she's not dead. She's wandering and she winds up at home where her parents notice something is wrong. They call the doctor, he says she's got 12 hours or so before she turns, much to the dismay of her father, a beast with incestuous ideas.

Meanwhile, Freddy decides he's a superhero while Russell, Lana's dad, tries to get a few goons he knows to solve his latest problem. When Maggie and Karl and Freddy wind up, thanks to a bum deal with some car keys, wind up stranded in front of Russell's place he figures they've arrived to TCB, completely unaware that the guys he's asked to really TCB aren't' there yet, but that they are on their way.

Oops.

Chapter 7 - King Of The Wild Reverb

At the raceway, Karl and Freddy lament Maggie's absence - she's off to hang with some guy named Rob… he's in a band. They show up and he invites them to go see his band play the next night. Not thrilled about this, they go anyway and Freddy runs into an old pal, Gideon.

When they get there they realize that Rob's going to kill himself on stage and our heroes decide to make sure that when he dies, he stays dead so that Freddy can console Maggie.

Chapter 8

The shorts make up the first hundred or so pages of the book, after that we get a mammoth tale that makes up the next hundred or so pages in which our heroes go on a massive misadventure involving the religious right, a strange Sgt. Peppers' tribute, a lot of death and chaos and carnage, prison, poop, and a lot of crushed heads.

Chapter 9

This one takes place on the moon where a wooly mammoth and some zombies are up to no good - no it doesn't, Freddy and Karl are just watching some TV. Their last adventure found Freddy flush with cash and it's gone to his head. He's wearing Juicy track suits now and paying Karl hundreds of dollars just to get him a beer. Things are starting to get strained with Maggie while Karl, who heads outside, gets in trouble with some zombie thugs.

By the time it's all over, Freddy has slaughtered all sorts of things, the zombie wooly mammoths have arrived and our heroes once again wind up involved in a really, really bad plan involving space travel, a jungle adventure and some dinosaurs.

The Z-Word is pretty funny stuff. There's a lot of social commentary in here that's rather poignant but mostly it's all played for laughs. There's a lot of zombie mayhem tucked away in the book's three hundred pages but more often than not the walking corpses are just sort of an inconvenience - the scenes that take place in Los Angeles? We see the zombies replacing the homeless, asking for spare change and what not. Freddy and Karl make for a pretty fun pair though, the big Belgian lout being the one who takes charge and meeker, nerdier Karl being the one who winds up in the thick of it. Jerry Frissen's stories are amusing enough while the art by Guy Davis in the first half and Jorge Miguel in the second is appropriately cartoonish but still interesting to look at. Those expecting serious horror should look elsewhere but if you enjoy absurdist humor and healthy doses of crass jokes and over the top violence then The Z-Word will probably make you snicker.