Faith Erin Hicks's Zombies Calling is a fun, fast graphic novel about Canadian university students who battle zombies on campus. The protagonist, Joss, is an incorrigible zombie movie nut who argues endlessly with her roommates about the internal consistency of zombie genre films and the rules that heroes must follow when they are confronted by the walking dead. She's also a helpless anglophile who peppers her speech with affectations like "crumbs," which annoys her roommates but is actually very sweet for the reader.
Zombies Calling fits nicely into the Scott Pilgrim mode: rich with pop-culture reference, snappy dialog, and a delightful disregard for the boundary between reality and fantasy.
Hicks has got lots going for her — great illustration and writing style, funny dialog and likeable characters — but what I was most impressed by was her cinematic talent for making a zombie chase-scene come alive with real tension through clever panel-layout and illustrations. I didn't expect to have my heart thumping over a funnybook about zombies, but thump it did.
