Victorian Undead ends, unfortunately, with a set-up for a sequel. My problem isn’t with the prospect of another Holmes versus zombies series, it’s more to do with Edginton’s set-up itself. His grand reveals for the series are, for the most part, bad and he suggests any sequel will directly involve them.
This issue, with its action-packed conclusion, plays pretty quickly. There’s a hurried, confusing resolution to the conspiracy and a callback to the first issue, which is also hurried and confused, and then Edginton moves to the final sequence.
In some ways, it seems as though Edginton is setting up a Scarlet Traces like London for Holmes to jaunt around in–there’s futuristic (steampunk) technology here, without any explanation of its origins–and I guess it’s an interesting setting, but his Holmes and Watson are so boring… I’m rather indifferent.
I was hoping for a lot more.
This series DID start out SO promising, only to fail to deliver the goods in the end. I like Barberi’s art. He and Edgington are from the British school, and have more or less a classical approach to a comic book story. I have to agree though that in his desire to produce a “franchise”, he neglected to ultimately give us either a deeper Holmes to get us involved with the protagonist, or more nasty zombies, to make the antagonist more threatening. I imagine there IS a sequel planned, but he’ll have to turn it up a notch all around to keep my interest in continuing.