A review by meepelous
The Abandoned, Volume 1 by Sophie Campbell

3.0

A bit of an older title, this book was published by TokyoPop in 2006 and was rated Older Teen.
According to her twitter profile Sophie Campbell is "Creator of Wet Moon and Shadoweyes, writer/artist of TMNT and Jem & the Holograms. Ice cream enthusiast, Gamera fangirl, cat lover."
I had read and reviewed a couple of Campbell titles before the great channel reset, but this is the first one I've re-reviewed. Jem and the Holograms review is coming soon!
To summarize "Everyone 23 and older suddenly dies one fateful, stormy night, but quickly rises from the dead. The zombies seek out the only living thing left: their children. After Rylie escapes a nursing home, she makes her way through the swamps of her hometown to find her crush, Naomi, before the dead find her first."
Looking at my initial review on goodreads I did comment that this felt a little less then original, probably due to my high consumption of zombie stories at the time. At this point my zombie story consumption has dropped dramatically because I didn't need that much pretend death... Returning at this point, with so many people I subscribe to openly talking about genre tropes in such a not judgy way, I feel like it's a bit silly to say it's unoriginal. Many classic zombie tropes are mixed and matched and ultimately packaged in a way distinct to Sophie Campbell.
As far as gender, race, and sexuality goes, we do see a decent amount of diversity. This collection of misfits don't have much in common except being macabre and poor. Which means the class representation is also pretty top notch. It's not too often I get to read books where characters believably struggle with money, forced to do things like weather out a hurricane instead of evacuating, because they can't leave.
The queer romance that's woven throughout is also very well done IMHO.
Ability vs disability is perhaps the least highlighted, as usual. There's also some ragging on the elderly people who Rylie works with.
A very distinctive art style, even if this story doesn't seem your cup of tea, Sophie has done a lot of stuff across several genres and many more all ages stuff since The Abandoned.
Originally rated this title three out of five stars and probably going to stick with that.