Return of the Living Dead: Untold Tales of the Tarman #1 Review

Some horror icons creep into the room. Tarman? Nah, son. This greasy nightmare slides through the front door, chews somebody’s forehead like an empanada, and starts demanding brains like rent is due. Return of the Living Dead: Untold Tales of the Tarman #1 takes one of zombie cinema’s most recognizable monsters and gives him an origin dripping with Trioxin, military stupidity, forbidden romance, black sludge, and enough gore to make your local butcher call out sick. WEPA! American Mythology Productions understood the assignment. This comic is nasty, ridiculous, violent, and fully committed to the punk-rock insanity that made the franchise legendary.

Writers S.A. Check and James Kuhoric open inside a secret military morgue, where scientists are messing with a gas capable of dragging the dead back into the land of bad choices. One revived subject wakes up confused, terrified, and hungry enough to make a brain buffet out of everybody nearby. From there, the story flashes back to Lucky, an awkward librarian preparing to propose to Lucy, only to walk into a romantic disaster so foul that Jerry Springer would have taken a smoke break. Murder, betrayal, flying bodies, and government interference eventually put Lucky on the road toward becoming the oily ghoul fans know and love.

The story moves fast and never loses that sleazy midnight-movie flavor. Check and Kuhoric keep the dialogue loud, the humor dark, and the violence gloriously over the top. What gives the book a little extra meat, though, is Lucky’s remaining connection to Lucy. Somewhere inside all that rotting flesh, part of him still remembers love, pain, and betrayal. He is not just hungry. He is suffering. That gives Tarman’s brain obsession a tragic edge without turning the book into some sad zombie therapy session. Relax, fam. He is still tearing through skulls.

Greg LaRocque brings the old-school horror-comic juice. His storytelling is clean, physical, and unapologetically grotesque. Bodies twist, eyes pop, faces stretch, and every bite lands with nasty impact. His strongest work comes during Lucky’s transformation from wounded human to bloated corpse and finally into the blackened creature fans recognize. When Tarman rises through the steam covered in oil and decay, that is the money shot. Big. Filthy. Iconic. My man looks like death crawled out of a Brooklyn sewer and skipped breakfast.

Colorist Emmanuel Ordaz keeps the pages bold and readable, using sickly greens for the Trioxin experiments, hot reds and oranges for the chaos, and heavy blacks once Tarman reaches his final form. Letterer Rob Jones deserves love too, because this book gets loud real quick, yet the dialogue and sound effects remain easy to follow. That full creative team balance matters. The comic is wild, but it never becomes visual soup.

Return of the Living Dead: Untold Tales of the Tarman #1 does not try to reinvent zombie horror. It does something better. It gives a cult-favorite monster a fun, gruesome origin while preserving the franchise’s dark humor, sleaze, tragedy, and absolute disrespect for human anatomy. Longtime fans will eat up the references, while newer readers get a fast, bloody introduction to one of horror’s nastiest icons. This is fan service with teeth, baby.

Send more readers. Just hide their brains first!

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5

Writers: S.A. Check and James Kuhoric
Artist: Greg LaRocque
Colorist: Emmanuel Ordaz
Letterer: Rob Jones
Extras: G.O. Parsons
Publisher: American Mythology Productions

Cover Artists
Cover A: Kyle Hotz
Cover B: Tim Seeley
Covers C and Century: Roy Alan Martinez
Cover D: Buz Hasson
Covers E and Racy: Greg LaRocque
Variant Edition: Paul Maitland