Zombies VS Robots

Ashley Wood and Chris Ryall's "Zombies VS Robotss" is an interesting experiment in both art and narrative. With Wood's gritty and explosive art style dominating what thin narrative exists, it's quite easy to ignore the story and simply allow your eyes to lock themselves into autopilot for essentially the entire work.

In terms of technical arrangement, Wood doesn't merely break the rules of conventional comic book paneling, he burns them and tosses them into a ditch. Action spills across multiple, barely-implied  panel borders and pages, with lavishly-illustrated splash pages serving as pictorial exclamation points at the end of frenetic action sequences.

Other novel elements include ancillary 'definition' panels providing outside context for certain otherwise unexplained portions and characters in the story - a clear reversal of the "show, don't tell" maxim, something that comes across in the work as oddly refreshing.

The bulk of the work consists of the titular robots and zombies shredding one another into a fine pink and gunmetal mist, joined later by a tribe of lesbian zipatoned amazons, culminating in an apocalyptic battle that guarantees the theoretical destruction of all zombies, granting the heroes an ultimately temporary respite.

A truly intriguing and unique work, something that I found early on when I was first becoming acquainted with Mr. Wood. It really set the tone for the sort of work I felt at the time that I eventually wanted to be doing about two years ago (though that turned out quite differently - oh well). I felt that I learned (and I feel that I continue to learn) quite a great deal from Wood's flair for effortlessly dancing between the realms of narrative and image, and combining them in a way that is truly astounding.