Daybreak is the world's only second-person zombie apocalypse graphic
novel: the main character is "you," whose face or body Ralph never
shows, whose viewpoint frames the entire story and whose voice is never
heard. You begin the book by meeting a friendly one-armed man, and spend
most of the rest of the book in his company -- dodging zombies (whose
faces are almost never seen, as if You spend all of your time looking at
the ground to keep your feet), scrounging for food, and having
variously tense meetings with other still-human survivors.
Ralphs
has a detailed, textured art style that works well for this story --
he's really good at drawing rocks and rubble, broken machinery and
tangled junk, rain and darkness, grubby hide-outs and makeshift
shelters. His dialogue is serviceable, but it gets choppy -- he's only
showing one side of a conversation, but still wants the entire thing to
be clear. Daybreak has a clever idea, but it never transcends the
level of "clever idea" -- the story is just fine, entertaining on a
picaresque zombie-story level -- but the reader has to assume that
Ralphs was aiming at something more than that, and Daybreak
doesn't deliver on that level. Still, it's a fun graphic novel with
zombies and an interesting organizing idea, which is pretty good.
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