Like all professional, well-adjusted thirtysomethings, I spend much of my free time watching the CW television network. Gossip Girl, Arrow, Flash, Reign, Jane the Virgin. What more could a guy need?
While I was an early(ish) adopter of Veronica Mars and have read more than one Rob Thomas (the Veronica Mars creator, not the matchbox 20 singer) book, for some reason I was late to the game to his show iZombie. Why? I don’t know. Fortunately, my wife was not. She was all over iZombie from the get-go, and we just finished watching season one together. I love it, and I might like iZombie’s Liv more than the titular Veronica Mars. No one is more surprised than me.
Rob Thomas adapted his television show iZombie from a Vertigo comic book of the same name by writer Chris Roberson (Serenity comics, The Shadow) and artist Michael Allred (Silver Surfer). The books are spiritually similar, but very different in plot.
[Very minor spoilers below.]
In the comic version of iZombie, the protagonist, Gwen, is a gravedigger in the Pacific Northwest who happens to be a zombie. She is friends with a ghost from the 1960s and a werewolf who hangs out in a diner and works an IT job. Paranormal and fantastical hijinks ensue.
Because it’s a comic and not a broadcast tv show filmed in Canada, the comic can give its audience a weirder, larger world than the show. I got the sense that the first volume of this comic barely scratched the surface of the richness of the world that Roberson created. I’m looking forward to picking up the other trade paperbacks from my local library.