In the story, zombie outbreak was the real cause of the Black Death. But these are not regular zombies, they are smart-ass zombies that can ambush, retreat, reorganize and hunt you down. Lucky for us we have the men of the Fiat Lux, the assassin's arm of the Church, to help us fight those hungry bastards.

I liked the art and the premise. Also, know that It's very explicit. I lost interest half the way between issues 3 and 4. I'd be lying if I say that I will continue with the second volume as I lost interest in the story.

This graphic novel was not for me. The premise about an Historical Zombie outbreak is a good one but instead it just served as a excuse for excess gore. I found I did not like any of the characters so there was no rooting value. The artwork and story line is overly graphic without adding anything. Often it reminded me of a high school boy's notebook doodles. I would have preferred more story.

Wow, that was bad. I could have lived with the plot being lifted from a direct-to-video horror flick and the cheesy dialogue if nearly every woman in this graphic novel hadn't been nearly naked--even the zombies were topless!

Great artwork!!! Great concept behind it. But even as someone who can out curse a drunken sailor on shore leave, this had way too much gratuitous swearing for the setting. It made it a boring read instead of an interesting story.

A zombie plague in the Middle ages during the time of the black plague? Yes, please! The book started off very strong. However, the pacing was off in the last couple of issues. It felt very crammed together and rushed. The end wraps up things a little too neatly for me and felt like something of a cop out. The book is extremely crude, so be warned the language is rough! I loved the art. It reminded me of Hubert Ramos kinetic art.

'Pestilence, Vol. 1' by Frank Tieri with art by Oleg Okunev is a grim-dark fantasy comic that puts an interesting spin on the Black Death, but is so grim and over the top, that I kept getting pulled away from the story.

In the late 14th Century an ex-crusader named Roderick heads up a motley strike team called Fiat Lux. They are agents of the church. A strange sickness causes those infected to react violently and attack. It is feared that the Pope could be next, so the Fiat Lux team is sent to rescue the Pope and take him to Paris. Everywhere they turn, their are more zombies. The zombies are getting smarter and smarter.

Grim-dark seems to be where fantasy is these days. The stories are dark and violent. They are also full of gratuitous sex and language. I really like the premise of the black death being a zombie plague. I don't mind bad language in the service of a story. I liked the art well enough, especially the covers. The delivery felt a bit over the top, and it ended up not being my sort of thing in the end.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from AfterShock Comics, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

Well, that's one way around the annoying trope where characters in a zombie story seem never to have seen a zombie story: set it in the Middle Ages. And yes, with the amount of death and destruction going around back then, you can plausibly spin a secret history where it was all covered up as just another plague, especially if the story kicks off in 1347, right when conventional history places the onslaught of the Black Death. Not to mention how handy plate armour is for keeping your leads alive through all those hordes of undead, removing the need to go for the slower, stealthier approach of a <i>Walking Dead</i> and enabling more in the way of full-blown <i>Army of Darkness</i> carnage.

However.

While <i>Army of Darkness</i> is undoubtedly a film to gladden the heart of any teenage boy, it still somehow feels at once more mature and more innocent than <i>Pestilence</i>. I'm not averse to the trick whereby a historical story can use modern swearing, thus conveying to a modern reader how shocking now-milder language would once have seemed - but a <i>Deadwood</i> or a <i>Spartacus</i> deployed such wonderful conviction and invention in its cursing, whereas here you're pretty much blind to 'cunt' by the second issue (which said, I am British, so perhaps it would still have some impact on an American). And while the carousing and the ultraviolence are fine, and Okunev draws decaying corpses with commendable relish, the wenching...well, the degree to which it's unclear how keen the wenches are on the wenching feels, in a new comic being published in 2018, at least a little awkward. Not to mention some of the peculiar anatomy in those scenes.

And then you have the codex containing a few scattered records of previous outbreaks. Which the artist has made no apparent effort to have resemble a mediaeval scrapbook, instead drawing the whole thing in pretty much the same style as the main action. And a sort of greatest hits approach to mediaeval things of which the casual reader is likely to be aware, meaning we have Templar survivals knocking around, and apparently Outremer is still a thing, and...I like a bit of secret history, but you need to really know the established history in order to twine this sort of story around it. And maybe the team here do - but if so, it doesn't come across that way, and in art the impression is more important than the fact. All of which comes to a head in a predictable, slightly rushed and very unsatisfactory deus ex machina resolution.

(Netgalley ARC)

Pestilence imagines a world where the Walking Dead came in the medieval times and was passed off as the Black Death caused by rats by Roman Catholic Church and the secular authorities, But the real story is that some churchman was experimenting and something went wrong, got out and spread. A secret society of Church assassins were tasked with finding out the cure and rescuing the Pope. Plenty of fighting, plenty of betrayals and backstabbing with pokes at all sorts of conspiracy tropes. An interesting take on the topic. Just wished they had used a more readable font.

So the black death was actually a zombie plague! really?!? This is the kind of title that smaller publish houses can specialise in and as such will find its niche market of graphic novel lovers who will talk long into the night about the minutiae of the plot, unfortunately, that is not me,

Beautiful artwork. The copy I received from Netgalley in return for an honest review, had issues with some of its pages so I couldn't get a good idea of its dialogue. So all I can really say was that it was nice to look at.

Pestilence, Volume 1 by Frank Tieri is what independent comic publishing is all about. This is a tale that would never have been released by the bigger names in the industry. But as such, it also needs to be that much better than what they would have released. Pestilence comes up short there.

The black death is actually a zombie apocalypse? To battle it, the church sends out its own black ops team? Seems like a plot that should have become the next big thing. But the execution of the story leaves one feeling instead that this is something out of SyFy B movie.

Just didn't do it for me.

Roderick is the leader of the Fiat Lux, the fighting arm of the Catholic Church in 1347. The Fiat Luz is tasked with taking the Pope to a safe house in England from his residence in the French countryside.

The world is in the middle of the plague of the Black Death. Eventually 20 million, or 60% of the population of Europe, will perish. Plague victims begin to rise from their graves becoming eaters of the living.

Wow, just wow! The art and especially the lettering of Pestilence Vol 1 perfectly set the mood and evoke the era. I loved the revisionist plot. It is hard to explain why without ruining the wonderful surprises within this excellent comic. Pestilence Vol 1 combines the best of historical fiction, adventure, horror and mystery. It is definitely for adults only and may offend some Christians, especially Catholics. For all others, it is highly recommended. While this is marketed as volume 1, it can be read as a stand-alone story.

Thanks to the publisher, Aftershock Comics, and NetGalley for an advance copy.

I’d almost rather have a zombie chew my nose off than read this again.

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for rape and misogyny. This review contains spoilers.)

DNF at 75%.

The year is 1347, and the Black Death is sweeping through Eurasia. Sent to dispatch a rogue crusader in a distant kingdom, a regimen of the Church’s army known as the Fiat Lux is summoned to the Vatican to rescue the Pope. Instead they are unwittingly drawn into a vast conspiracy involving zombies, religious dogma, and Jesus and Lucifer.

On the surface, Pestilence is a pretty cool idea: what if the Black Plague was actually a zombie outbreak? The plot line is surprisingly boring, though, and I only really cared about one character, who’s killed off just as he becomes interesting.

Worse still is the dialogue. If I had a dollar for every time “cocksucker” or “cunt” makes an appearance, I could buy an entire case of Daiya cheese. (At the 5% case discount, yes, but still: that shit is expensive!) I don’t have a problem with swearing, but here it’s pathetically overdone, as if it was written by a couple of ten-year-old boys who just discovered the f-word. There’s also some pretty gratuitous female nudity [side eye], as well as a full-page pillage-and-rape panel that’s both wholly unnecessary and obnoxiously insensitive [lighting this book on fire].

And then there’s the scene that made me throw in the towel (spoilers!). One of the characters is a woman who’s passing as man so that she might serve in the Church’s army. Bitten by zombie, with her and her comrades surrounded by a swarm, she sacrifices herself to save them. And, well, I’ll just let the panels do the talking.

http://www.easyvegan.info/img/pestilence-volume-1-01.jpg
http://www.easyvegan.info/img/pestilence-volume-1-02.jpg
http://www.easyvegan.info/img/pestilence-volume-1-03.jpg

Let me repeat that for emphasis:

http://www.easyvegan.info/img/pestilence-volume-1-03.jpg

So, in apologizing for being a sexist satchel of dicks, the sword that dude falls on is a disparaging term for women [headdesk].

I can only imagine that the author thought he was doing something “nice … for the ladies” here, only to fail in the most epic way possible – and ruin the only redeeming part of this story for me in the process.

I wish I could get the hour I wasted on this book back. Failing that, a giant pot of liquid gold would suffice.

Huh. A new take on the black plague.

I’m surprised it hasn’t been done before.

But I thought it was a pretty good read. I mean, it’s pretty dark - so don’t go into if you’re not comfortable with R-rated material. But if you can get past that, it’s an interesting book. Interesting enough for me to find the sequel so I know how it ends!

<i>Feces and Satan!</i>

<i>Thanks to NetGalley, Diamond Book Distributors, and AfterShock Comics for a copy in return for an honest review.</i>

I was completely sucked in to this story from the first page. Brilliant idea and very well told and illustrated.

I really liked this comic, that assumes the Black Death was not a rat-borne disease, but was instead a plague of the zombie kind. It's not delivered perfectly - the disembodied heads that crop up in the corners of panels to give dialogue are just weird, the characters are hard to discern when they don their armour, and you could call the short flashbacks to develop character derisory in effect. But even those don't delay the pell-mell, irreligious tone of things, and what we have is a really satisfying, continent-spanning romp. It looks great, it reads fine, and surely everyone (bar those with a dislike for the potty-mouthed heroes) will be on board to read more. Four and a half stars.

When I saw the art of the first few pages, I wasn't sure if like this book but I really did. Those first pages contain sex, nudity and violence as well as some swearing thrown in for good luck. This is not a graphic novel for your kid. This is a graphic novel with an excellent story and great art to go with it though. If the premise interests you, do what I did and sick it out and I doubt you'll regret it. I very much look forward to the next volume in the series.

I would like to thank the publisher, author, and Netgalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Great story idea: the Black Death was really a zombie plague hushed up by the Catholic church. This was a lot of fun, as we follow a devoted group of crusader/knights fighting their way through a medieval hellscape, trying to discover the secret behind a strange disease that appears to bring the dead back to life. The Church doesn't want this getting out, because it would undercut the story of Jesus, so they've spread the lie that it's all caused by rats and anyone who gets too close to the truth is a heretic and excommunicated. The art was great, just this side of too cartoony--it reminded me a lot of early Walking Dead. And the story and interactions between the knights of Fiat Lux had me hooked. I'm not sure there's anywhere for this story to go at the end (it's fairly conclusive), but I'd pick up a second volume.

Ok, so, we all know that the plague was a super bad thing that killed a bunch of people in Europe throughout the middle ages right?
Well, this book asks the question: "what if the plague actually turned people into zombies? And also, what if the Catholic Church covered it up so that (stay with me here guys) people would not associate JESUS with ZOMBIES."
Add a whole lot of blood and boobs and that basically sums up Pestilence

Knights vs zombies in Middle Ages Europe - instantly forgettable fantasy, easy to see how this originated as a game given the thinness of the plot and clichéd characters. Art was decent but didn’t make up for a boring read.