Resident Evil #1

Resident Evil! Although I've never played the games myself, I once sat in a darkened dorm room watching someone play the second entry in the series, and my current roommate has played the fourth game about 476 times in the past few years, so I'm practically an expert! And one of the things I know about the series is that there are zombies, and you shoot the zombies. There's a bunch of atmospheric spookiness and zany villains, but zombies is pretty much the core of it.

Which is why I was pretty surprised to read this (twelve-page, free) comic and find very few zombies at all. It opens with a terrified tactics squad member radioing headquarters to tell them that something very scary is happening in a mansion in a remote mountainside town. You wouldn't know it from the artwork, though:

(Above: Zombies. Or the guy's former teammates who got ripped up by "something horrible". Or oddly-shaped shrubs.)

Yeah, but survival horror games are like that, right? You see only glimpses of the horror and then once you've gotten yourself all calmed down, BLAMMO! Zombie in your face! So anyway, the comic builds atmosphere by... giving us three pages of conversation at the tactics squad headquarters, and then we're back with our hapless zombie hunter for:

(Above: WOW, a puzzle where you push stuff!)

This is actually pretty true to the game, from what I remember - for every minute you spend fighting horrifying creatures, you spend ten minutes pushing boxes around onto buttons or looking for the right keycard or whatever. It actually kind of works in the game, you get lulled into a false sense of security just long enough for the game to scare the crap out of you again, but in the comic, it's just silly. Oh okay, it's a little silly in the game as well.

Dude runs down the stairs and runs into a giant snake, and his buddies on the squad helicopter in to try to figure out what's up with him. And - it ends there. Although this is Issue #1, you were expected to buy the game to continue this gripping story. I don't know why you would, though, as the comic implies that this is a game where you stumble into pillars and have snakes jump out at you, and that doesn't sound very much fun at all. And why were there no actual zombies in the book? If you were a comics artist and you got the chance to draw a zombie, wouldn't you gleefully grab your pencils and bristol board and go to town? It's not like they were trying to keep the zombies a secret, there's one in the ad inside the back cover of the book:

(Above: HEY, A ZOMBIE)

There was basically one thing they could have added to make this not a boring story, and they left it out completely. I'm not counting the silhouette, I didn't even catch that on the first readthrough. Yes, I read this more than once. Why - I'm beginning to think that this was just a cheap marketing ploy, and not an attempt to create an engaging and entertaining story!