14 Days: Deliverance on Crack – Donny Grimm’s Crossed Review

Last month I posted a review of the comic, Blackgas. I told you about how brutal and chaotic it was and how sick I got just reading it. Well my waves of nausea nearly overcame me a second time when I picked up a little comic called Crossed. Crossed, by Garth Ennis, is a mini-series of comics that heavily emulates Blackgas both in story and brutality. A virus turns humans into raving lunatics with, get this, cross-shaped rashes on their faces, that kill, eat, and fuck whatever they get their hands on, including fucking the stump end of a severed leg. So what if there’s no actual black gas, fuck you, all zombie stories start essentially the same way. While people are always being found and killed off, the story follows about 8 essential characters through 9 issues of Fuckville as they try to make their way through the hordes of ghoulish psychos to what they hope to be snowy salvation in the Alaskan wastes. This is another comic that throws morality to the proverbial wind and stuffs all the blood, guts, death, rape, cannibalism, child killing, and terror that’s physically possible to do in nine short issues. Crossed also suffers from the same flaws that Blackgas did. Albeit, there is a much deeper story this time around, there isn’t much of a chance for us to get to know any of the characters and so you never really feel for them when something eats their face. Sometimes Ennis tries to add drama to situations that just don’t warrant it, like when one persistent fuck of a zombie beats a man to death with a severed horse’s penis…seriously I couldn’t make this shit up…and they affectionately name this guy Horsecock…again no joke. But all that aside, as a fan of gore and terrifying brutality I have to say I got my fix from this. I don’t know what it is with writers nowadays, its like one day they realized zombies weren’t scary anymore and they had to at least make them nauseatingly visceral. All in all, Crossed is an average comic with very little innovation to offer hardcore zombie fans, but hey nobody said you need an original idea to be successful.

Final Score: 3/5

-Donny Grimm