NightBeetle
Turbo Justice!!!!
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''Fred Van Lente and Kano bring the super-powered undead back to life for another round of mayhem''
The best zombies always come back for more, which is why the Marvel Zombies rise again this April in MARVEL ZOMBIES 5, a five-issue limited series courtesy of writer Fred Van Lente and artist Kano.
"What I've tried to do ever since they gave me the Zombies assignment was to do something different every time," explains the writer. "Folks who read [MARVEL ZOMBIES 4] know that at the end Jack Russell, Werewolf by Night, was infested with the zombie virus. Morbius the Living Vampire wants to cure his friend and in order to do that he needs to somehow figure out a way to unlock a cure for zombie-ism. He recruits his old pal Machine Man from MARVEL ZOMBIES 3, who is back and is again the star of the series, and sends him across the multiverse to take samples from different kinds of zombies."
Van Lente notes that each issue of MARVEL ZOMBIES 5 features a variation on the zombie theme from throughout popular culture. From the slow-moving George Romero style to the crazed infected from "28 Days Later" to even the Deadites in "Evil Dead," the writer equates the limited series to a "smorgasbord [or] salad bar for the zombie connoisseur." But as variety is the spice of life, Van Lente decided to sweeten things up even more by also setting each issue against an assortment of backdrops.
"We've got zombies in the Old West, we've got zombies in Killraven's War of the Worlds, we've got zombies in Camelot," he exclaims. "I like the storytelling challenge of taking a straight-forward genre and twisting it into pretzels. It's also fun to come up with new ways to eviscerate zombies."
As mentioned earlier, zombie hunter and Agent of A.R.M.O.R. Aaron Stack returns as the central character of the title. Van Lente shares that he always liked the Machine Man, whether as the classic conflicted hero from his self-titled Jack Kirby series or as the drunken proponent of robot rights from NEXTWAVE.
"I see Aaron Stack as someone who can't help himself and is compulsively heroic," he argues. "Some people have to control drug addictions and some people have to control kleptomania, but Aaron, if he finds himself in a situation where heroism is required, he just thrusts himself into it. That's the aspect that I like exploring."
Since fighting off zombie hordes always proves tough work, a new companion joins Stack on his reality hopping adventure. Unfortunately, the identity of that individual remains a secret for now with Van Lente only revealing that the character will be someone well known in the Marvel Universe and someone he's been dying to write. However, wanting to give fans a small sampler before the big buffet, the writer did let slip some info that should get a few spider senses tingling:
