Comic Book Review: Dead Rising – Road To Fortune

I’m a big fan of the Dead Rising games, in fact the original game was one of the first I played on the Xbox 360. The sequels that followed were just as good & the upcoming Dead Rising 4 looks like it’s going to be a blast!

Dead Rising: Road to Fortune, a four part series bridges the gap between the original game & the events that took place in the mini-release, Case Zero (released as a kind of teaser to the soon to be released Dead Rising 2).

Here we follow the major players of the main games, Frank West & Chuck Greene. We see what happened to Frank after the Willamette outbreak & how Chuck lost his wife in the Las Vegas incident, the same incident that saw his daughter get bitten & that sees him end up in Fortune City.

The series begins showing Frank having a nightmare about his final moments in Willamette, fighting off hordes of the undead while trying to rescue Isabella Keyes. He wakes from his nightmare when a zombified Isabella takes a chunk out of his neck.

Frank’s not in a good way, having to take Zombrex daily to keep the zombie virus at bay (he was bitten in Willamette), drinking too much & watching his career slowly disappear. A small outbreak being covered by Rebecca Chang gets his attention on the radio & a plan begins to formulate. Frank wants to expose the government’s involvement in Willamette & sees Rebecca as the perfect partner to help him do that.

Meanwhile, Chuck, his wife Pam and their young daughter Katey are on their way to Vegas where Chuck is going win big in a motorbike race. The family are in high spirits unaware that Vegas is going to have a catastrophic outbreak, one that will tear their family apart.

Road to Fortune is an excellent read for fans of the series filling in plenty of the blanks while offering more detail & insight into certain other characters. Ever wonder how T.K came up with Terror is Reality? Well, you’ll get your answer here!

I found the Chuck Green part of the story way more fascinating & it really made me more sympathetic to his gruff, unfriendly demeanour that we see in Dead Rising 2. The man lost his wife to the zombie virus…not only that but she bit Katey & he had to kill her, his own wife. That’s really something & I can’t help but think they should have expanded more on that in the actual game!

What is disappointing is the bare-bones explanation of what happened to Isabella after the Willamette outbreak. Now, fair enough, Frank wouldn’t have known much but I really wish this had been expanded on. I mean the government took her & she was likely to have charges of terrorism lobbied against her. That there is a story in itself!

The comics art style is fabulous, gory & violent but with bright, easy on the eyes colour. The zombies look fantastic and they come across terrifying, the Vegas outbreak pages had me on edge!

The only draw back are the text bubbles & the small writing inside them. There can be piles of text to read on one page then nothing on the next page! I’d have liked to have seen it spaced out a bit more.