The Zombie Survival Guide Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks

The Zombie Survival Guide Recorded Attacks Reviews

• 
  Edward Lorn

  I was hoping for a little than what I received here Which is odd considering I went into this with very low expectations I read World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War when it first came out and enjoyed it I figured I'd at least enjoy this funny book as a mild distraction But it left me with an overall feeling of meh I don't regret reading it but I could've done something better with my time Like say trimming my toenails or shaving my assIt was almost like an episode of Ancient Aliens about the undead I'm not saying it was zombies But it was zombiesIn summation I will not remember this comic in a week The artwork was great but something about the way the stories were told got on my nerves The book was 1700 when it came out I got it for a uarter at my local thrift store I think I paid about a uarter of what it's worthFinal Judgment Far boring than World War Pitt
• 
  Don

  Reading this was enjoyable enough but the I've thought about it afterward the annoyed I've becomeFirst there isn't any new material here; all the material is taken directly from the Zombie Survival Guide This in itself isn't terrible it's just not what I had been expecting But the stories are still as interesting as they were the first time around and the art does make the incidents immediateWhat's entirely irritating however is the publisher's approach to the book This is billed as a graphic novel but Max Brooks is the only listed creator On the cover on the spine and even on the title page The artist Ibraim Roberson is listed on the bottom of the back cover but inside he is only credited in tiny type on the publication info page This is particularly heinous because given the above note about no new content it's clear that Max Brooks had little if anything to do with the actual creation of this book In other words Ibraim not only drew the entirety of the book but he also had the not insignificant task of adapting the tales in the first place as opposed to drawing from a script in which Max had already done the work of figuring out which bits to keep which bits to show and which bits to excise Unless there was another uncredited creator doing the adapting work Which may very well beThe difference between an illustrated novel and a graphic novel is that you could theoretically take the illustrations out of the former and still have a complete work while if you take the art out of a graphic novel you don't; this is one of the many reasons why graphic novels prominently list both the writer and artist of a work as its creators and not just the writerClearly Three Rivers Press doesn't get that Or maybe they just don't care
• 
  Kemper

  As a big fan of Brooks' World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide I was really looking foward to this graphic novel that tells of zombie attacks through history The stories are interesting and once again Brooks' writing shows that he's spent waaaayyy too much time thinking about tactics to fight off zombies If there ever is a zombie apocalypse I vote we put Brooks in charge of our defensesBut this is short and sweet and didn't fill my craving for another Brooks zombie book Plus I think Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead series has the market cornered on great zombie comics Fun to read but just made me want a follow up to World War Z in novel form
• 
  Melissa

  I find it very distracting when a comic is written where sentences ellipse through two pages and it's only one thought that's trying to be conveyed Supposedly this adds to the gravity but I'm not buying it Since I've been waiting for this book since 2008 I was hoping it'd be a little longer
• 
  Becky

  35 Stars OK I really loved The Zombie Survival Guide Complete Protection From the Living Dead the audio performance of World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War and I have plans to read World War Z next month since the audio is abridged I know I know Blasphemy Yes but it's awesome still It's the exception Trust me Just look at the cast list and so I thought that I would round out the Max Brooks trio on my bookcase and pick this up I enjoyed it for the most part and I think that the artwork was great I liked the stark simplicity of the stories regarding each historical attack but there were times when I wished for a little explanation of what we were seeing in the frame and how it related to other frames etc These are just pen and ink drawings and sometimes I felt that a little explanation or context Meanwhile overhead etc would connect the imagery into a cohesive story It wouldn't have taken very much but I felt it would have benefited from those small additionsRegarding the artwork this really is my favorite style sketchy not overly processed drawings I loved one scene showing hordes coming from afar and they were just the barest subtle outline of a shape but it gets the point across I love that But I do have one complaint and this is really why I can't give this a higher rating This is regarding the inconsistent way newly turned zombies were depicted I get that with this 90% wordless medium the artist would want to differentiate between swarthy dirty rugged menfolk and the undead and so would take a little liberty The easiest way to do that is to monsterize the zombies I'd have been OK with that if ALL of the zombies were shown that way and if that fit in with Brooks' canon but they weren't and it doesn't Part of the danger of the zombie virus is that it turns people and those around them don't yet recognize the danger because other than a bite they look perfectly normal So there is one part where a woman's body is found bound and frozen and some men take her inside where she thaws out The men are baffled because she should be dead but isn't Then she starts nomming one of them and they kill her for good The whole time she looked normal if a little deranged Certainly NOT rotting or ragged But the man that she bit comes back looking like he clawed his way out of a shallow grave after spending a couple months decomposing in the summer heat It was just really inconsistent and slightly aggravating Otherwise I really liked this little book I don't regret the purchase and would definitely recommend it for those who like gory zombie graphic novels because it was that I'm just kinda finicky about artwork I don't apologize for that dammit I'm sorry Oo
• 
  Andrew

  This is a comic book that you can read uite uickly and it’s the first that I read by this author This is a sort of journalistic reportage with episodes about the zombie phenomenon in human history manifestation distribution transmission and in many cases instruction on how to stop it in fact removal of all infected Funny graphically well done but the short number of pages saved it from boredom A little longer and it would be too repetitive Nice I think I'll try to read other stories of the author
• 
  Azbaqiyah

  Plot 5Writing Style 3World Building 5Art 3Cover 3Overall 38 5It's like reading or watching a biography
• 
  Greg

  This was a broadly amusing short read that attempts to create a pseudo history of recorded outbreaks of the solanium virus and the resultant attacks by zombies on the living at various locations around the globe in the past 60000 years Illustrated in black and white zombies are shown in varying degrees of decay gore and savageness in contrast to their usually startled and horrified victims I liked linkages between zombies and aspects of actual Romano British and Egyptian archaeology but from the horror perspective the idea of the crew and prisoners of a 17th century slave ship being infected with the zombie inducing virus was perhaps the most horrific story as the slaves could not escape their fate chained below decks Also horrific was the story of a murderous Cossack scouting party in late 16th century Siberia whose own cannibalistic behaviour met its match in a certain Siberian communityHowever I was a little disappointed about the research put into some of the historical settings It would be likely for anatomically modern humans and Neandertals to have been using composite spears made from a wooden shaft a stone spearhead and the binding used to haft the head to the shaft rather than just sharpened sticks to kill fish World Prehistory A Brief Introduction p 82; The Origin of Our Species p 127 while nets and fish traps are also likely to have been used c 60000 years ago The story set in St Lucia in 1862 when this West Indian island was a British colony was wildly inaccurate on many points As slavery had been abolished throughout the British empire in 1833 it could not still have been present in Lucia in 1862 making the story's ending impossible There were other anachronisms the militia and troops were shown wearing tricornes a type of hat that was out of fashion by c 1800 as was the powdered periwig except for the British legal profession The Union Jack would have been the flag used by the British navy while the tricolour would've been used by the French even though it was then an empire in 1862 the flag of England and the fleur de lis for Bourbon France are shown instead Perhaps the author had intended to set the story a century earlier or that the illustrator Ibraim Roberson had confused the 18th and 19th centuries An outdated cannon is also later on shown to be used at a fort garrisoned by the French Foreign Legion in Algeria in 1893 and I'm not convinced that a fort would be left completely out of contact for three whole years if you don't hear from a fort after a certain time you would surely send people to find out what was wrong It's also unlikely that a fort controlled by the French Republic would've been named after a king Louis Phillippe who had been deposed to make way for a republican government in 1848Overall the book was fun but it would've been much better if it had been written to offer an alternative explanation for certain historical events or practices as was done in the stories set in Roman Britain and ancient Egypt The guillotine of Revolutionary France would have been very effective at dispatching captured zombies for example while the 14th century Black Death may've involved something darker than the bubonic plague
• 
  Sesana

  This is a companion of sorts to Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide which I seem to remember reading years ago The basic concept is to briefly cover in graphic novel format a series of outbreaks occurring throughout history starting in the stone age and ending in modern America The narration is written exactly as you would expect if it were actually presenting a series of historical events Apparently this was all originally written for and published in the original Survival GuideThe art is by Ibraim Roberson I had a hard time finding his name anywhere on the book and eventually found it in eensy wee type on the bottom of the back cover Considering that this was pre existing material that was it seems entirely adapted by Roberson it's a bit of a ripoff to hide his name as much as they did I have heard that later editions have corrected that by properly crediting him That said I love his art and thought it was a perfect fit here I loved the grayscale sketchiness of it and the level of detail was just right Roberson knows when to pull back a bit There are a few inconsistencies in how the zombies were drawn but that didn't bother meIt's a very very uick read because there simply isn't much content It would have been nice if there'd been a few stories or if some of them had been longer Most of them can be read in just a couple of minutes Enjoyable enough but there's just not enough there for me to rate it any higher
• 
  Nancy

  Considering how much I loved the audio edition of World War Z I expected a whole lot from this graphic novel Written by Max Brooks but illustrated by Ibraim Roberson these twelve short stories left me wanting The stories began chronologically with the first story set in Africa in 60000 BC The second story was my favorite for it made a connection between zombies and explaining why ancient mummies that have been discovered have had their brains pulled out The remaining stories criss cross the world and move forward in time with the last three being in the modern era since the 1940's While the art work was excellent and the stories if told in isolation are interesting it strained credibility that there have been multiple zombie outbreaks that haven't garnered world wide attention and been eradicated while the threat was small I felt WWZ was plausible enough but these stories were not