Review – The Waking Volume 2: Dream’s End #1

Some of you may remember that we reviewed the four issue series The Waking from the creative mind of Raven Gregory and published by Zenescope a while back. The story was a fresh twist on zombies and really caught me by surprise. In a word, it was incredible. The writing, art, story and characters played really well together and the ending left us with a semi-cliffhanger that was begging for a follow-up run.

Well, in the words of Professor Farnsworth, “Good new everyone!” The series is back for another run with "Dream’s End". Created and writen by Raven Gregory with pencils by Novo Malgapo, colors by Michael Garcia and lettered by Crank!, The Waking Volume 2: Dream’s End #1 picks up right where it left off.

Vanessa Pelagreno returns after her valiant actions in the last comic left her in a kind of limbo. What’s that? You MISSED the first volume of this title? Okay, I’ll forgive you this ONE time. Let me put it in a nutshell for you.

Murder victims were returning as nearly unstoppable zombies to avenge their deaths and kill those who murdered them. This was all made possible by a man with a curious power. As we find out at the start of this issue, this has made the world a virtually murder free place. After all, who would murder someone if they were just going to come back to kill them?

For Vanessa this is both a good thing and a bad thing. See, Vanessa is a homicide cop. I’m not sure what homicide cops do when no one is committing murder. As we’ll soon see, some monsters can’t be stopped by the threat of supernatural vengaence. The stage is set for an interesting showdown.

Since the happenings of the original series, Vanessa has moved from town to town without really finding peace. She's haunted by the face of Madison, the daughter of the man who was bringing people back from the dead. The girl has a haunting, zombie-like face and Vanessa sees it everyone. This has led to difficulty laying down roots.

She finds herself in Chicago investigating a series of disappearances, where she also meets her new partner, Dorian Grant, an all-star homicide detective from the west coast. The two of them have some investigating to do. There's a new monster out there killing people, but no bodies are ever found.

This title does a nice job recapping the rules and important events of Volume 1 while introducing some great questions and really getting things off to a screaming start. After being treated to a rather frightening scene of mangled and malformed bodies followed by a rather brutal murder, we shift to Vanessa and her struggles with Madison and her past. How these events tie together should be interesting to watch.

The biggest question is the obvious one. How has someone gotten around the rules and begun murdering people again without the victims coming back for revenge? The rules were set in the first run of this series and “Dream’s End” seems an appropriate title for this second run if those rules are weakening.

I know I’m intrigued, and if you like supernatural books with a side of zombie and a touch of murder, you should be too! Check it out in stores in late April and it's available for order through Diamond Previews. For more information you can also check out Zenescope’s annoucement about the title at their blog.

Happy reading!

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