If you’ve read Max Brooks’ entirely deadpan and therefore entirely chortleworthy The Zombie Survival Guide, then you’ve already pretty much read the content of this graphic novel. If you haven’t, then what you’ve got here is a nice little collection of zombie attacks throughout recorded history, in a setting that assumes that they’ve been going on all this time and that they only seem more recent because we’ve just gotten way better at recording them.

For Max Brooks fans, the main virtue of this volume is the appeal to completists and to those who might like the art. There’s no new content here, so for me, the selling point was seeing the stories I’d already been introduced to in the Guide depicted visually. And there are certainly some arresting visuals to be had herein, such as the fight scene at the beginning between a zombie and a prehistoric African in a jungle setting–or, much later, an initiate in a secret order forced to spend the night alone in a chamber full of severed zombie heads in jars.

Not all of the encounters in the Guide are depicted in the graphic novel, so this volume’s best as a companion to the Guide‘s stories, and not as a replacement. Three stars.