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Victorian Undead

#1–6

4.7 / 5

Worth It

Victorian Undead Vol. 1 asks a question nobody knew Arthur Conan Doyle had forgotten to answer: what happens when Sherlock Holmes has to deduce his way through a zombie apocalypse?

Writer Ian Edginton begins with a meteor streaking across London in 1854 and bringing something considerably worse than bad weather. The resulting outbreak is quietly buried by Her Majesty’s government, but decades later the dead begin walking again—and naturally Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves investigating.

The fun comes from how seriously Edginton treats the ridiculous premise. Holmes approaches reanimated corpses with exactly the same analytical confidence he would bring to a locked-room murder. Zombies aren’t supernatural horrors to him. They’re simply another problem with evidence, causes, and—presumably—a perfectly logical explanation.

Things get even better once Professor Moriarty enters the picture. Because apparently controlling London’s criminal underworld wasn’t ambitious enough.

Davide Fabbri’s artwork gives Victorian London plenty of fog, machinery, laboratories, and suitably unpleasant revenants, while the steampunk additions expand the world without completely overwhelming the Holmes atmosphere.

Victorian Undead could easily have been nothing more than a novelty mash-up, but there’s a surprisingly solid Sherlock Holmes adventure underneath all the rotting flesh.

The game is afoot.

Unfortunately, some of the players are dead.

Writer: Ian Edginton
Artist: Davide Fabbri
Publisher: Wildstorm
Publication Year: 2010
Genre: Adventure, Horror
Read: Aug 2026

Read Aug 2026

All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder

#1-10

3.2 / 5

Decent

I avoided All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder for years.

After The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Frank Miller had earned enormous goodwill with me. Then I read The Dark Knight Strikes Again and watched most of that goodwill flee Gotham at high speed.

So when Miller teamed with Jim Lee for a new Batman series in 2005, I passed. The furious reviews, infamous dialogue, and glacial publishing schedule only reinforced that decision.

Eventually curiosity won.

And, surprisingly, I didn’t hate it.

The key is accepting that this is not our Batman. Miller’s Gotham is a warped, cynical reflection of the DC Universe, and its Batman is a product of that world: arrogant, unstable, brutal, and absolutely convinced that referring to himself as the “goddamn Batman” is something normal people do.

I also can’t help feeling that the modern Absolute DC Universe—with its darker, harsher reinterpretations of familiar heroes—owes at least a little of its storytelling DNA to All-Star Batman & Robin. Miller was already experimenting with the idea of taking the recognizable shape of the DC Universe, stripping away much of its optimism, and seeing what crawled out of the shadows.

Oddly enough, that makes the book work better for me as a prequel to The Dark Knight Returns than The Dark Knight Strikes Again works as its sequel.

My biggest problem is the artwork—which feels ridiculous to say because Jim Lee’s pages are gorgeous. They’re simply too polished and heroic for Miller’s grimy, dystopian story. The words say Sin City while the pictures say blockbuster DC superhero comic, and the two are constantly wrestling for control of the page.

All-Star Batman & Robin is messy, excessive, frequently absurd, and definitely not for everyone.

But it is never boring.

And sometimes that’s enough to make me turn the page.