Zombicide: Day One #1 - Source Point Press

ZOMBICIDE: DAY ONE No. 1, January 2023

Considering just how hard it must have been to convert a Ludo Award-winning collaborative board game into the medium of a comic book mini-series, Luca Enoch and Stefano Vietti’s narrative for Issue One of “Zombicide: Day One” can surely only be viewed as an enthralling triumph. Indeed, the oversized thirty-two-page periodical’s plot is arguably faultless in its pulse-pounding presentation of the dead’s sudden return “to life to devour the living” and all the madness which ensues as an ever-growing group of survivors wade their way through chaos-strewn streets and cadaver-packed public places so as to reach the relative safety of Luke’s Garage.

Admittedly, the publication’s script doesn’t dwell upon what precisely caused the “bacteria going around that makes you feel so sick that turn into a raving lunatic”. But its invigorating pace doesn’t allow for such word-heavy exposition as the audience are thrust right in the thick of things by a pair of brain-hungry corpses as they unexpectedly fling themselves through the glass window of Clancy’s diner and start chomping upon the throats of its customers. So adrenalin-charged a moment comes just as the storyline suggests this opening instalment is potentially going to focus upon people simply disbelieving Ned’s mad ravings about an imminent apocalypse rather than anything quite so dynamic, and resultantly may well catch many a perusing bibliophile off-guard with its savage suddenness.

Equally as intriguing is the writing team’s ability to find the time to flesh out a few of this comic’s quite considerable cast, most notably that of paramedic Diana, whose black and white coloured flashback sequence demonstrates just how swiftly the infection takes hold of her hospital despite its hapless staff’s best efforts to organise a quarantine ward. This grisly nightmare genuinely helps establish just why within hours Wanda and her friends are facing “a city full of zombies” and how, whilst desperately searching for ammunition and supplies, even the tiniest of noises could fatally attract an entire horde of sharp-teethed ghouls.

Working incredibly well alongside Enoch and Vietti are artists Alessio Moroni and Marco Itri, as well as colorist Paolo Francescutto. Together this creative team provide some quite stunning eye candy, most notably whenever the undead are either lurking about in the shadows or hurling themselves at the steadfast survivors with wild, blood-thirsty abandonment; “We’re out of choices… They’re closing in behind us and the only way out is through these.”

The regular cover art of "ZOMBICIDE: DAY ONE" #1 by Luca Bulgheroni & Giorgia Lanza