4 out of 5

I’ve criticized Infinity 8 in the past for feeling a bit forced: it’s not fully clear why the captain of the good ship Infinity 8 has set a time-resetting protocol into place to explore the mass space graveyard it’s run into except that it makes for a fun, multi-part comic book setup; each reset that sees a new character investigating that graveyard being interrupted by some ship-wide panic similarly seems just sort of like page-filling excusery.  This hasn’t prevented the series from being a good time, with some great writers and artists, but some arcs have been better than others at distracting us from the missing rhyme and reason.

With Apocalypse Day, writer Davy Mourier and artist Lorenzo De Felici finally get it to sort of click, both conceptually, and how the over-arching ‘story’ might actually be more directly related to the mini-stories to which each arc has subverted.  In the former case, the tagline of issue one explains quite a bit: “…Aliens, Zombies, and Zombie Aliens?!” I’m sure smarter readers than m’self have already picked up on this, but ringleader Trondheim has essentially been taking us on a tour of various pulpiness, volume to volume, with some classic adventuring, Nazis, sexploitation, and horror sci-fi, all mushed together, tongue very much in cheek.  While I’m looking for a more complex story at the core of the goofiness, there’s been a lot of entertaining genre nods happening on all of these pages.  And while I haven’t truly been blind to that, ‘Apocalypse Day’ successfully tied its unleashing of – yes – zombie aliens into lead character Agent Ninurta’s graveyard-focused mission, while at the same time sort of shrugging and tossing it aside.  Arc writer Davy Mourier just fully leaned in to the zombie aspect of things with a fully committed ‘why me worry’ shrug, and in a way, relaxing on the perceived “importance” of events made it easier to appreciate their relevance.  The book is just tons of fun.  And then, while doing that, and amidst the fun, we also end up getting some payoffs for that core plot at the same time, and nods to previously appearing characters…

De Felici’s art and colors are fantastic, up to the task of the increasingly insane mayhem of the unleashed zombos that Ninurta (and some associates she picks up) scuffle with, and though Mourier repeats some jokes verbatim a couple of times (or the translation from Jeremy Melloul does), he finds a fantastic pitter-patter pace with his dialogue and actions that, as mentioned, keeps the whole thing zipping along, while also building Ninurta into a lead we actually start to care about.  With some of the previous stories, the timeline reset just feels incidental to the end of the arc, but here, when things go worse and worse for Ninurta, we hope it gets reset, for her sake.

For my sake, I want to try some other books by Mourier, but alas, they’re all in French.  So I will savor my time with him in Infinity 8, and credit to Apocalypse Day for now making me go back and reread the previous arcs with a slightly shifted perspective…