Each Friday, we'll be letting a different DC.com writer share what they'll be reading over the weekend and why you might want to check it out. Here's this week's suggestion for a perfect Weekend Escape!
 

We all love zombies, but these walking corpses have been done to death. If you’re going to give us yet another zombie apocalypse, you’ve got to do something interesting that we haven’t seen before.

DC Vertigo’s Bleeding Hearts does this by shifting the focus from the human survivors to the zombies. They wander around and feast on the living, but they’re not brainless. They have a whole society of their own, mostly revolving around their relentless pursuit of “live ones” to track down and consume.

But what happens when one of them starts to feel a little less zombie and a little more human? Well, that gets complicated.
 

The Premise:

Bleeding Hearts begins with Poke, or more accurately, Mouse-Pokes-Golf-Ball-Through-Hole-in-Head. See, zombies name each other based on unique characteristics. Poke has a hole in his head. His best friend Mushrooms-Grow-Up-All-Over-Like-Little-Forests has tiny mushrooms growing on his body. My personal favorite is Bird-Nest-in-Head-and-Crown-of-Crows-Above.

Poke and Mush belong to the same horde, which is the closest thing zombies have to a community. Their days mostly consist of hunting for “live ones” to devour, though surviving humans have become increasingly rare over the years. Zombies can seemingly persist without sustenance, but they never lose their taste for flesh. 

Poke has a problem. His long-dead heart has started beating again, and he’s developed alarming feelings about humans. He doesn’t want to eat them. He wants to befriend them.  Poke grapples with this discovery alone as best he can, hiding the thumping muscle beneath his exposed rib cage under a vest, but everything changes when he decides to hide a mother and her young child from his hungry horde.
 

Let’s Talk Talent:

Writer Deniz Camp you may be familiar with thanks to Absolute Martian Manhunter, which gives a dose of body horror to a familiar character, or Marvel’s Children of the Vault. Here, you can see what Camp does when creating a world all his own. It’s lush with lore, and the setting feels lived in—or unlived in, as it were. It’s been a zombie’s paradise for a long time, and Camp drops us right into it.

Artist Stipan Morian brings it all to life, which is no easy task considering the wild array of zombies that pepper this forsaken America. The aforementioned Bird Nest guy really has a bird nest growing out of his head. Three baby crows sit in it while their mother flies overhead. One zombie has been severed at the waist and only the bottom half remains. It communicates through dance. Morian really manages to sell how zany it all is, yet somehow still conveys the emotions the characters feel—even if they have a flower growing out of their head.

Letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou also does some clever work here, adding text that drives actions across the page in unexpected ways. He also illustrates a curious language barrier: despite the fact that zombies were once humans themselves, they no longer speak the same language. When humans talk, it just sounds like screeching, and vice versa.
 

A Few Reasons to Read:

• The zombies have an interesting thing going on. While there are other works where zombies retain sentience and socialize—iZombie being an obvious example—Bleeding Hearts sets up a world in which the zombies are the dominant form of “life” on Earth. They’re not attempting to blend into a human world or control their cravings. They’re content being zombies. It’s particularly interesting to learn that they have politics, morals (one zombie has been shunned for finding and eating an entire family without sharing) and even holidays. One grisly tradition has them rounding up human survivors just to hunt them down together.
   
• The narrative switches between Poke and two human survivors: Cara, and her young daughter, Rabbit. Poke is, of course, the zombie who gives us insight into their culture. Cara has seen the cruelty of the world that remains, while Rabbit, despite never knowing life before zombies, maintains a wide-eyed openness to others. Their shifting perspectives offer a fuller story, expounding on the themes of empathy or, in some cases, a necessary lack thereof.
   
• Bleeding Hearts is also funny, in a macabre way. Learning about zombie society will have people who like their humor dark grinning widely.
   

Why It’s Worth Your Time:

Zombies do rip people apart and eat them, so it’s not like Bleeding Hearts is a feel-good book. It’s a gory work, appropriate for Halloween. But it also has a lot of heart. The story could be fairly simple: a zombie gains a conscience and tries to protect humans from other zombies. Yet it’s not a matter of good and evil, as Poke is the only zombie who could even begin to see it that way.

For the other zombies, eating humans isn’t wrong, no matter how cruel their traditions may be. It’s simply what they do. For Poke, who considers his horde his family, his newfound empathy creates real conflict. Mush isn’t just Poke’s best friend, but a brother to him. They go way back and have participated in zombie rituals of loyalty to one another. Poke is constantly torn between Mush, his supposed ride-or-die, and Rabbit, whose naivety allows her to see the humanity he forgot he had that now beats against his will inside his corpse.

Paired with the other survivors and zombies we meet along the way, Bleeding Hearts has set up a compelling tale that stands apart from the shambling horde of zombie fiction. With its first collected edition now in stores, Halloween is the perfect time to sink your teeth in.
 

Bleeding Hearts Vol. 1: Out-Break by Deniz Camp, Stipan Morian and Matt Hollingsworth is available in bookstores, comic shops, libraries and digital retailers as a softcover graphic novel. The series can also be read in full on DC UNIVERSE INFINITE.

Juliet Bennett Rylah writes about horror, Vertigo and the dark side of superheroes for DC.com. Follow her on Bluesky at @JBRylah.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Juliet Bennett Rylah and do not necessarily reflect those of DC, Warner Bros. or Skydance, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.