Continuing the Infestation weekly event that IDW launched, Act 2 (as I call it) has been fully released now. Act 2 is G.I. Joe #1 & #2, Ghostbusters #1  and the conclusion event Infestation #2. Act 1 was the launch event Infestation #1, Transformers #1 & #2 and Star Trek #1 & #2.
G.I. Joe #1 & #2 This was an interesting story, but it felt like I was missing something at the start. After a few pages I actually stopped to make sure I was reading #1 and hadn’t mixed them up to start with #2. Once I got a a few more pages into the story it made a little more sense. But there was certainly a portion of this story that required knowledge of the G.I. Joe comic universe. The Joe character Psyche-Out and Cobra character The Baroness are solid characters whose roles are important in the universe. So we have a stage set for the conflict. The story starts to play out when Cobra discovers a low key Joe operation on a sailboat and attacks, capturing them. Revealed in the capture is a cyborg arm which instantly reminded me of Terminator. Cobra has a scientist in their facility that hooks the arm up. Of course it is infected and takes over the underwater base. At this point it reminded me a bit of an old Dark Horse series called Virus (a movie was made based on it too, but not that well.) The virus takes over all tech on and begins to make threat assessments based on individual potential and dealing with them accordingly.
The interesting aspect of this issue was that it didn’t deal with any actual zombies. But the story worked fairly well. Not being a fan of G.I. Joe, I still found the story enjoyable. Especially the ruthlessness of The Baroness. She was willing to be helpful or diabolical based on which she felt would ultimately help her out. A nice trait to see in villains. Too often they are more one dimensional and do bad things even if it has negative impacts on their goals. 4 stars on this story.
Ghostbusters #1 & #2 This one I was looking forward to. I loved the movie (come on, who didn’t?) I was curious about the comics and was very pleasantly surprised to find the characters were extremely well written. If you know the movies you can see and hear the actors giving the lines, but without that they still were fleshed out appropriately to carry out a story. With this portion of Infestation we get to experience yet another aspect of zombieism. There isn’t a mass of zombies rampaging. There are a handful and they seem to be guided in some fashion. Luckily the Ghostbusters are on the scene and manage to deal with a zombie. Their methods however cause the zombie to explode and the biological debris hits a cat turning it to a zombie. There is a side story that we pick up in progress. The traps they use to capture ghosts are starting to pile up because of some defect in the containment grid (ghost jail) that is allowing them to escape. Through an accident of sorts a ghost is released near a zombie. The two have some sort of merger that neutralizes both. Cool. they now have a plan on dealing with the zombies should anymore pop up. Before they can worry about that though they discover that something else escaped. Something big. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. (Yeah, they went back to him, but with such an awesome villain, how could you not utilize him?) They head off to deal with him and something interesting happens. The zombies attack and transform Stay-Puft. But it isn’t as easy as that. He actually splits in the process and we have good Stay-Puft vs Zombified Stay-Puft. That alone was worth the price of admission to Infestation ($40 for all 10 parts) Wrapping up this story we see the Infected vampire Britt and she gives a cryptic comment along the lines of “I will leave them something interesting to remember all this by.” After reading this I want to get any Ghostbusters that IDW puts out. 5 stars on this portion. It was a great story AND has persuaded me to continue the series.
Wrapping up the entire thing is Infestation #2. The spin off Infestations have been dealt with and Britt has returned. She is trying to bring the Undermind through to the CVO universe. They are still reeling from the Infestation. In their world the zombies were a massive swarm and did real damage. I really don’t want to say much about the story here as it was really good wrapping it all up. But wait. IDW has announced Outbreak. This would be a follow up of sorts to Infestation. But that is fodder for another day. The wrap up I give 4.5 stars to.
That makes an overall rating for the series at 4.5 stars
