By Todd Allen

Vertigo has announced a new mini-series, The New Deadwardians.  I have to admit, I chuckled when I read the description:

Set in post-Victorian England, nearly everyone in the upper class has voluntarily become a vampire to escape the lower classes who are all zombies.

Thrust into this mayhem is Chief Inspector George Suttle, a lonely detective who’s got the slowest beat in London: investigating murders in a world where everyone is already dead!

But when the body of a young aristocrat washes up on the banks of the Thames, Suttle’s quest for the truth will take him from the darkest sewers to the gleaming halls of power, and reveal the rotten heart at the center of this strange world.

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read that was Hugh Laurie’s upper class spymaster from the first season of Spooks/MI-5 growing a pair of fangs.  And then I chuckled again.  The metaphor might not be a bad one for the British class system.

The writer on this is Dan Abnett, who’s doing Resurrection Man with co-writer Andy Lanning over on the other side of DC.  Abnett’s done a lot of work over the years including several 2000 A.D. features, a large portion of Marvel’s cosmic/Annihilation line and the late, lamented Knights of Pendragon.  He’s also written a fair number of novels.

The artist is INJ Culbard who’s been working on some of those literary adaption graphic novels you may have seen at the bookstore: Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray.

8 issues starting in March.

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