From Action Philosophers to Spider-Man, Fred Van Lente has certainly come far in the past few years. I have enjoyed his work on Incredible Hercules but the place where he has been having the most fun is in the pages of Marvel Zombies. Taking over from Robert Kirkman, Van Lente has turned the concept of the zombies comic into something very unique and outlandish. After several sequels and zombie variant covers dominating Marvel’s monthly books, even the most die-hard fan has gotten bored just hearing about Marvel Zombies. Rather than take that reaction as a reason to drop the idea, Van Lente has heard it as a challenge and from the sound of the early reviews, it’s working like a charm.
Fred Van Lente talked to the folks at Comics Alliance last month about his latest foray into the realm of the fantastically horrific:
CA: You’ve got “Marvel Zombies 5” on the way â what’s coming for “Marvel Zombies” fans in the new series?
FVL: What isn’t coming, Laura? “Marvel Zombies 5″ is kind of a smorgasbord for zombie connoisseurs. We have this scenario in which the alcoholic robot Machine Man has returned, and is now tasking with hunting down and collecting samples from zombies across the Multiverse. So it’s like a United Colors of Benetton of zombiery. He manages to collect various allies along the way, including one that I think everyone will admit is the perfect person to be a member of A.R.M.O.R., the Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response agency, which is charged with containing the zombies. And we go into all these different genres, so they’re going to Camelot, a post-apocalyptic War of the Worlds” Martian tripod world, a cyberpunk world from the 1980s Barry Windsor-Smith “Machine Man,” but in the first issue they go a world where the frontier was never settled, and it’s perpetually the Old West, so you get all the Marvel western characters. One of the first things I ever saw Jeff Parker write was in a book in 2006 that we both did as part of this “Marvel Westerns” event, and his story was way better than mine. So I’m going to do a sequel to it, because I’m oedipal like that. His story was about this really obscure character called the Hurricane, the fastest gun in the West, so I’m doing what happened to Hurricane after he got old story. With zombies. And robots.
CA: Dimension hopping is always so interesting, because it allows you to go literally anywhere you want to go in terms of time or place or genre.
FVL: The whole Marvel Zombies thing came about with Mark Millar and Greg Land in “Ultimate Fantastic Four” where Ultimate Reed Richards ended up in the zombie world, so it just seems to be part of the theme of the series from the beginning. And since it’s a different dimension you can kill anybody and it doesn’t affect continuity.
What began as a continuation of the Marvel Comics Comics version of the Avengers by Mark Millar has developed into an all-out franchise. Van Lente has taken the zombie version of the Marvel Universe and turned it into a device to tell whacked-out stories featuring obscure characters such as X-51, Machine Man. I’m happy to hear that this exploration of the third tier of Marvel will continue as the series delves into multiple realities.
Still available:
Marvel Zombies 3
Marvel Zombies 4
The Daily P.O.P. 