Nothing Will Ever Be The Same: Infestation review

After ten issues and eleven weeks, IDW's crossover event, Infestation, came to a close this week. I originally saw some promotional stuff on it at NYCC last year, promising some zombie mayhem across a handful of mini-series. Unlike the Marvel/DC events that tend to dominate the market, the premise here saw several franchises of IDW's liscensed comics, not sharing a common continuity in the slightest, coming together; Star Trek, Transformers, Ghostbusters and GI Joe, along with original IDW properties Zombies Vs Robots and CVO (Covert Vampire Operations). In the end, the books delivered what was on the tin, and for the most part they were pretty fun, but in the end the detached nature of the separate stories may have hurt the series overall.

Infestation #2, IDW

The initial issue set-up the premise pretty well. Unfamiliar with both CVO and ZvR as I was, it did a good job introducing the characters and concepts the series would be built around. We're given the standard prologue of a bunch of scientists fooling around with a Stargate-looking device that of course opens on a dimension full of zombies, which readily pour into this dimension full of magic and "artillica", any number of devices utilizing technology laced with magic or vice versa. The invaders are not a viral type of zombie, but rather a magical infestation powered and controlled by a hive-mind known as the Undermind, capable of infecting both organic and mechanical beings (hello, Transformers). As the CVO are called in to put down the zombies, one of their own, the vampire Britt, gets bitten and becomes "Undead Squared". The union of different magics and such somehow give Britt the ability to open portals to new dimensions, splits up her spirit and sends it in as an avatar of herself into the four portals she's able to open before the machine is disabled. That's just the set-up, that alone requiring a fair amount of suspension-of-disbelief to run with, and it really only gets more convoluted from there.

Infestation #1, IDW

The four minis that branch off from here have a few base things in common: Britt, in some form, shows up to gather something from each universe, and there's some kind of infestation spreading (not necessarily zombies). Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between each book, each one bending the invasion to their own rules and styles. Abnett and Lanning do a fairly straightforward zombie tale in Transformers (albeit with robot-zombies in addition to the human ones that don't pose much a threat). Star Trek, written by Scott and Dave Tipton, makes the zombies a viral threat, seemingly only affecting the organic characters while Ghostbusters presents it with their own unique supernatural spin. GI Joe, completely separate from the rest, makes it exclusively technological in origin, turning Cobra's AI and cybernetic divisions rogue. While they work fine within their own confines, such disparate mechanics don't do much for the coherency of the series as a whole, especially when you're bouncing from title to title each week, especially when they're all brought back together at the end. Or, more specifically, not brought together. For all intents and purposes, the events of the minis and whatever Britt had been gathering seemed to have no discernible bearing on the conclusion in Infestation #2, other than single two-page spread showing Britt's forms from the four universes. Maybe it was necessary to properly balance things, but as a ten-issue event, Infestation felt disconnected.

Looking at each mini on its own merits, however, it works much better. Overall, the art was good. I loved Messina's work on the Infestation bookend titles, and Giovanni Timpano did some beautiful atmospheric work on GI Joe as killer robots invaded as undersea Cobra lab. Roche on Transformers had a angular, stylized look than you normally see with those characters. Maloney and Erskine looked good on Star Trek, but as I mentioned in my review of the second issue, there was a bit of discrepancy between the original characters and the ones being drawn from existing people. The only one with art I didn't really care for was Ghostbusters, but I think it's more of a stylistic preference choice rather than any problem with the art on a technical level. Pretty much every book found the voices of its character and managed to feel like an actual story that would take place in its respective franchise, albeit a horror story which, aside from Ghostbusters, is a genre none of them dallied in too often. I think GI Joe adapted to it best, keeping it fairly simple although it was easily the most detached from the Infestation core story, but still telling an excellent tale of technology gone awry without deviating far from what you'd expect from a GI Joe comic. Transformers was more on the other end of the spectrum, shoehorning concepts and comic-book-science in jerkily and acting more as a teaser for Abnett and Lanning's next Transformers comic, Heart of Darkness, than bothering to tell a complete story in its own issues. Ghostbusters had some of the same issues, although some of the batshit pseudo-science they slung around isn't far enough out of their wheelhouse to take you out of the story while reading it. However, instead of really working with the characters it was just regurgitation of the same old jokes and quotes, falling back on references in lieu of coming up with actual new material, which for me has been a massive annoyance not just for this comic but pretty much all of Ghostbusters releases and fandom. I could live a long, happy life never hearing the phrase "Don't cross the streams!" again.

Star Trek: Infestation #1, IDW

And one thing I didn't mention in most of my reviews since I didn't actually end up getting most of these (which I'm kicking myself in hindsight), but some of the covers on these books were absolutely beautiful. Every issue had at least one standard cover usually done by the interiors artist, all of which were very nice, and some had additional sketch variants or such, but also every one had a variant by JK Snyder (with some colored by Jason Wright) evocative of some classic movie posters from the "B" horror movie era. Hopefully a collected edition will have a cover gallery showing these off.

In the end, this series managed to be fairly erratic in terms of quality and content, but still was enjoyable overall; some of it pissed me off, but most of it was perfectly fine, some of it simply a great read. It may not have been what I expected or initially wanted, but in the end it delivered exactly what it said it would. And like any good crossover, it managed to set up the follow-up books, with a newly-announced monthly Ghostbusters title, the aforementioned Transformers: Heart of Darkness, the Cobra Civil War in the pages of GI Joe, a new Zombies Vs Robot book and a relaunced CVO series, Outbreak, all on the way. For being a bit sloppy and disjointed throughout, but still altogether enjoyable, I'll give the Infestation event a B+. Definitely worth peeping once it gets collected.