Graveyard of Empires

Murky but powerful, this comic piles one horror on another. It’s bad enough that a U.S. Marine combat outpost in Afghanistan is located in an isolated valley where the Taliban can harass it at will. Then a pigheaded CO arrives with impractical notions of pacifying the local population while simultaneously attacking the enemy. Then the dead start rising from their graves and feasting on the living. These are Romero-style zombies, lurching hungrily along until someone shoots them through the head. Unfortunately, the living combatants are more inclined to shoot each other. An explanation for how the corpses became animated is rather blah, and the action sequences tend to lapse into dark confusion. Despite this, the frequent reminders of how many invaders over the centuries have misjudged the odds of conquering this hellish region do effectively reinforce the gloomy lesson that people would rather die than learn from experience. (May)