I have a soft spot for Simon Garth, the character most often associated with Marvel's Zombie. Well, until those Marvel Zombies comics, I guess.
My history with Mr. Garth stems from his having been chronicled by Steve Gerber for a significant chunk of his existence. I tracked down the comics in a Marvel Essentials collection (which, btw, are not great for the colour comics, but are excellent reprint editions for the old magazines - for Tales of the Zombie, they reprinted the whole mag, not just the comics), and they were cool, creepy tales of zombies and voodoo, and are probably not terribly politically correct these days.
But Simon Garth was this very interesting character in that he was an absence of character. There's a strange similarity between Garth and Gerber's other non-character, Man-Thing. Both seem to wander through their stories as agents of the universe, rather than having any agency themselves.
Which is why I was kind of disappointed in what I read today. Now, I've only read the last of this four issue series, so that's all I can base this on, but it really seems they simply put a character named Simon Garth into a pretty normal-sounding zombie story. Now, perhaps it was the intention of the writers to include the tropes of the genre (the unlikely hero, the troubled woman, the criminal, the shady military) as a tribute, rather than as a crutch. The original Simon Garth stories traded heavily on the kind of zombie lore that was in the public consciousness at the time, as does this update. But I think it's that use of Garth as a cipher, or as a force of nature, that, for me, was often the lynch pin to the story. And that doesn't seem to be how they've deployed Garth here.
As I say, I have a soft spot for the character, and should I happen across the rest of the series for a reasonable price, I'm sure I'll get it. Unfortunately, from what I saw of the end of the story, it seems pretty run of the mill.
More to come...
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