The Death of Death. You know that the people behind this have put in a tremendous amount of work and spent many a sleepless night with a name like that. Hurr. Getting to the actual comic, by the looks of things, this should have any classic horror fan salivating. Firstly, there's Don Of The Dead, George A. Romero's name on it, along with the DC logo. The cover page looks great. The artwork inside is quite ass-kicking as well. What’s to go wrong? Looks can be deceptive...

The Six-issue mini-series starts off promisingly with a really cool first issue. It introduces to us, Damien Cross - our protagonist, a zombie, Mister Tembo - an elephant, his vehicle and Judy - the lady, the survivor. After being separated briefly, Mister Tembo brings Judy to a newly-zombiefied Damien. She is shocked that he has become a zombie. But this dude is a different kind of zombie - he has a memory of his previous life; he knows right from wrong. This is because Professor Hoffman injected him with a half-life serum as soon as he was bitten. Anyhow, they soon find out that the Government and its federal troops are after Damien, and Hoffman's serum. They must also evade Attila and Rasputin, the leaders of the rogue army of zombies which is growing in number by the hour. In the midst of all this Professor Hoffman needs to conduct research on zombie blood... Phew. Sadly, Hoffman meets his end after getting shot in an encounter with the troops leading to a very cringe inducing and painfully sluggish sequence of pages. On his deathbed, he triggers Damien's built-in crossbow (that's right, the doc made some mods on his zombie pal!) onto his forehead and commits suicide. Very over-the-top… in a bad way. But before offing himself, he tells Damien to continue his research. You read correctly. The zombie becomes a scientist. As the comic plods on, they meet some other survivors too. So there you have the plot-> the zombie, the woman and the elephant battle the undead AND the Government.

The story is alright. Nothing that hasn’t been done before but it has some cool additions. Supposedly this comic was a leftover-unused script, part of the Death trilogy, to be used as a sequel, but it was never done. Despite the passable story, the execution is deplorable. For example, a rather interesting aspect of the story is that Damien is genuinely confused about who is the lesser evil, the rogue armies or the Government. He believes that every zombie has its/his/her own personality. But see how they try to convey it, with dialogue such as:

Billy(one of the other survivors): "What is with you, man? I mean, whose side are you on?"
Damien Cross: "No one's."
Billy: "Well...Who are you against?"
Damien Cross: "I told you, no one."

Epic failure. This is just a sneak preview of the very bland dialogue-writing which sometimes makes your mouth gape wide open. I don't know why, but I got a feeling that the whole series was on a steep decline from the first issue onwards, in terms of the plot, inking, dialogue, continuity - everything. The story is somewhat painful to follow even though there are not too many characters involved. Surmising, Toe Tags: The Death Of Death series was a big disappointment, more so because of the very promising first issue (3rd one was the worst) and 'cause I usually like Romero's stuff. But the series does have a few redeeming qualities. The ending was quite enjoyable with bouts of good action here and there. Plus, the artwork stands out. Tom Castillo does some good work. His action sequences are rather thrilling. I'd recommend this only if you're a bigger Romero fan than a comic fan (or if you’re just really big on action with zombies - that sounds very iffy btw). I'm not. If you think you are, I'm sure you'll enjoy this more than me.