Review by Ian Keogh
As Chuck Dixon notes in his introduction, the Siege of Stalingrad during winter 1943 was as grim as warfare gets. Street to street battles were fought between desperate, exhausted forces in unimaginably cold conditions. So what might happen, Jeff McComsey considers, if you added zombies to the mix? Interestingly, his view is that the opposing German and Soviet forces might find some common ground united against an even more implacable and dangerous enemy.
McComsey’s title comes from the first human seen, Svetlana Gorshkov, a sniper known and feared by the Germans. Of course, given the situation there aren’t many Germans or Soviets, just feral, shambling dead. They’re a little less proactive than the zombies in other fiction, certainly responsive to noise, but someone alert and agile enough can pass through a crowd of them. However, when Svetlana attempts to rescue an infant, she rides her luck too far, and is thankful for the intervention of Major Otto Steiner and his dog.
Although they remain dangerous, McComsey treats the zombies more as a puzzle to be solved and worked around. They can live without food, but humans can’t, so how to move across a zombie-infested city to where the food is? It makes for a different kind of zombie story, perhaps something not seen before.
Were it not for the greytones used McComsey’s art would look etched on the pages in the manner of woodcuts. Thick ink lines and shadow create the effect, and his people all have a rugged, lived-in look, the harshness of their lives seen in their faces. His version of Stalingrad is more generic, not featuring landmarks, but a scarred, ruined battleground almost as unforgiving as the zombies when riled.
The main story has an epilogue that leads into a one-shot not collected here, so as such largely inconsequential. Three back-up strips follow. Steve Willhite draws the more interesting of them, revealing Svetlana’s background and considering what might have been had war not intervened. It’s cleverly told, the past combining with the present in the period before zombies changed everything. There’s nothing wrong with Giles Crawford’s wide-eyed cartooning on McComsey’s script of how a child in the main story wandered into danger, but was it a story that needed telling? Dixon and McComsey combine for the final short, a horrific war story with a sting ending. It does what it sets out to do, but it’s standard fare.
Some zombie enthusiasts will prefer their undead more proactive and aggressive, but Mother Russia will fit the bill for anyone willing to take a different view.
