Raid of the Dead – Review – A new breed of e-comics that is far from brainless

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By: Sisyphus Planning

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2011-12-10

Developer: Sisyphus Comics/Sisyphus Planning

Price: 0.99

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In 2001, Japanese filmmaker Naoyuki Tomumatsu released a horror movie called Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies. In it schoolgirls of a certain age bracket are affected by a mysterious malady which turns them into zombies or “Stacies,” as they are called in the film. Now, Sisyphus Planning, an up-and-coming iOS developer, has just launched a series of comics likely to please fans of the film in particular or of the genre to which it belongs in general. The series debut is titled Raid of the Dead: Schoolgirls vs. Zombies, and, sure enough, it’s a story about schoolgirls and zombies. But as the title suggests, at the center of the story are schoolgirls fighting zombies, rather than the former turning into the latter.

Comprising 50 pages of plot and character development, Raid of the Dead is bookended by bits of ominous and at times optimistic background music. And as opposed to traditional manga, it reads in the manner of most Western comic books, that is, from left to right. Simply tap on either side or flick across the screen of your device to turn the page, and tap and hold to see the page preview slide, add a bookmark, or view the controls primer. These controls work well whether you read the comic book in one-page portrait format or two-page landscape format.

Raid of the Dead is a standalone graphic short story optimized to be read on your favorite iOS device, be it an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The story is set in a vaguely recognizable time—it could be set in the near future, the near past, or the very present, for all we know—when an unexplained pandemic caused most people to become walking zombies. But a good many have managed to dodge the plague and survive, several of whom are the titular schoolgirls. These schoolgirls now live in their school, doing their best to fend for themselves and repel the peripatetic revenants that come their way. However, a greater battle seems to lie not outside the school premises, where zombiefied strangers and even their former friends now wander, but right within themselves.

The story is told through grayscale panels drawn in the distinct, sparse style of Japanese manga, something you might not expect to find in an electronic comic book that runs on a device that can render full color graphics and so-called enhanced interactivity. It’s actually this very absence of colors and gimmicks that lends more seriousness and solemnity to the story, since there’s also the tackling of pertinent questions of humanity and hope amid the abundance of well-drawn action scenes involving gun-toting schoolgirls, threatening zombies, a crashing helicopter, and more zombies.

Zombies in popular culture just won’t die, will they?