Review by Frank Plowright

Escape the Deadzone looks into the near future to a time when the US Pacific Northwest has been devastated by kaiju and declared off limits and uninhabitable by the US government. However, people do still live there, some with mechanical parts and one mutant with claws and a lizard’s tail,known as the Wanderer. If the price is right he’ll sort out smaller invading kaiju for you.

Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan have set up what’s in effect a future Western, but as drawn by Pablo Tunica it could be a 1970s underground comic, something in the vein of Vaughn Bodē. Influences notwithstanding, they set a unique tone featuring many people scrabbling about to survive in desperate times, and cut off from the remainder of the world developing their own insane theories. Hence a church of Godzilla, preaching an end of days deathwish.

There’s instant involvement in this insane society, as much as anything because Tunica applies so much effort in constructing and populating it. The Deadzone may be irradiated ruins, but it’s not a wasteland and Tunica litters it with debris, weird plantlife and nutty, but extremely dangerous creatures. Small panels emphasise a closed world, and the way Tunica draws them you’ll swear you can smell that world.

While the Wanderer has a secret we soon come to learn, so do the two children he meets, Glasseater and Runt by name. Parker and Sheridan introduce them in stomach-turning circumstances, but they and the Wanderer come to form an alliance of convenience, as when all is said and done they aren’t really keen on being the anti-messiahs who bring about the divine destruction of humanity.

As you might have gathered, despite his name in the title, this isn’t a story about Godzilla. They’re certainly a massive contributor to the way the Deadzone is, but the story works fine without them. In fact it’s all so captivating that when Godzilla makes a passing appearance you’ll suddenly realise you’ve read half the book without them. It’s shortly afterwards that escaping the Deadzone kicks in.

While Escape the Deadzone stands well as an individual thriller, it ties into the Godzilla reboot where kaiju energy, called kei-sei, has been co-opted by humanity both for better and for worse. It’s a useful power source, but can have unpredictable effects, like turning a young teenager with a crush on Godzilla into a giant. The longer the characters wander the more we discover the Deadzone can be a repository for anything and everything, limited only by Parker and Sheridan’s imaginations, so in that way much like Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth. It works well for Dredd and it works well here. Grubby, funny and exciting, we look forward to the continuation in Revenge of the Deadzone.