XOMBI
John Rozum and Fraser Irving
MYSTERY MEN #2 OF 5
David Liss and Patrick Zircher
SWAMP THING #1 OF 3 Jonathan Vankin and Marco Castiello
THE SEARCH FOR
FEARSOME FOUR #1 OF 4 Brandon Montclare, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Simon Bisley, et al.
FEAR ITSELF:
THAT HELLBOUND TRAIN #1 OF 3
Joe R. Lansdale, John L. Lansdale and Dave Wachter
THE GOON #34 Eric Powell
d
C Comics recently announced that in Sep- tember it will relaunch its comic line with a slew of new and rebooted titles in an at- tempt to revitalize the company. Naturally,
the announcement caused some concern among fans, especially followers of John Rozum’s excel- lent Xombi, which is conspicuously absent from the fall schedule. The comic, launched in March 2011, has garnered a tremendous amount of crit- ical praise and accrued a rabid fan base during its short shelf life. Xombi’s story began back in 1994 when it de-
buted as part of DC’s Milestone imprint, a line of comics showcasing ethnic super-heroes. The se- ries’ lead character, David Kim, is a Korean-Amer- ican scientist who becomes technologically enhanced after being injected with a nanotech virus. The nanites inside his bloodstream give him the power to restructure matter – including his own body, making him virtually immortal – by con- suming other matter (which could potentially in- clude other people). The original Xombi lasted a mere 22 issues and was well-known for its super- natural storylines and bizarre cast of characters. When the new Xombi debuted earlier this year,
readers were smacked with an outrageous story featuring a secret prison guarded by the Catholic Church (where inmates are shrunk and placed in- side miniature houses), super-powered nuns, a college student transformed into Mr. Hyde after reading a copy of Dr. Jekyll that’s “riddled with semi- colon cancer,” killer snow angels and evil Halloween spirits. And that’s just the first issue! Although Rozum doesn’t
describe Xombi as a straight-up horror title, there’s no denying that he’s a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool horror fan. “Horror is in my blood,”
he states. “I came to the genre through my childhood love of dinosaurs, which led to my parents letting me watch Godzilla and King Kong on television. I have a drawing I made when I was in kindergarten that’s meant
RM50
to be a family portrait. It contains myself, a green Frankenstein monster, a mad woman, a flying vampire person with a hat, a bat and a ghost. I used to watch The Munsters and think that somehow Marilyn and I had been acciden- tally placed in each other’s cor- rect families.” The writer’s love of monsters
and the grotesque is readily evi- dent in his work on Xombi, where there’s a veritable museum of the macabre on display. “These aren’t comfortably fa-
miliar monsters like zombies and vampires,” Rozum explains, “these are all new creations that hopefully are a bit unsettling in their alienness and unfamiliarity, like the snow angels and rustling husks from the first couple of is- sues and the dental phantoms and the sisterhood of blood mum- mies that appear in issue six. A lot of the fun for me is coming up with all of the monsters that no one has ever seen before.” Fraser Irving’s art on the series
Fraser Irving’s surreal art is the perfect match for John Rozum’s weird tales.
has drawn as much praise as the writing, perfectly capturing the nightmarish sense of the story with its clever use of colour and the near-grotesque expression- ism of its characters. “Irving approaches every-
thing from the characters outward and spent a lot of time asking me about them and their relationships with each other so that he could create individual perform- ances for them,” says Rozum. “He’s so successful in conveying the characters, their reactions and their inner thoughts in his art that I had to write less and less of this important material in the form of dialogue and de- scriptive captions.”
Although the future of the book remains shame-
fully in doubt, Rozum admits he has a master plan for the life of David Kim, which will hopefully see the light of day one way or another. The stories in Xombi are intended to take the character “from A to B” in each installment, allowing David to evolve throughout the larger story arc. Rozum already has a plotline in place for the series’ next progression, which will see a major, harrowing change. “Things turn very dark, very quickly and only get
worse for quite some time,” he says. “David’s de- termination to maintain a foothold in the everyday world that his friends still occupy is going to bring some really dire consequences to the people he holds dearest and this will also have a huge impact on him and the series as a whole.”
Attention readers! Run to your nearest comic store
and pick up Xombi if you haven’t already, and then let DC know you want the series to continue. Follow
johnrozum.blogspot.com for updates.
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