Hooves of Death | Review

Hooves of Death Vol. 1
Writer/artist: Sam Bragg
HarperAlley; $23.99
Publisher’s rating: Ages 8-12

Publisher HarperAlley describes cartoonist Sam Bragg’s Webtoon series-turned-graphic novel Hooves of Death as My Little Pony meets The Last Kids on Earth. For a more comic-specific example, I guess you could say it’s Phoebe and her Unicorn meets The Walking Dead. In either case, as you can see from the cover above, it’s a survival/quest narrative set during a zombie apocalypse, starring a unicorn.

As a critic, I’ve never been particularly fond of the “x meets y” type of descriptions, despite their obvious utility in quickly and efficiently suggesting something about a work in just three words. That’s because such pithy descriptions tend to be broad enough to suggest many different specifics, and because they can leave out so much nuance.

And Bragg’s comic has a lot of nuance beyond its intriguing premise.

Sometime well before the comic begins, a herd of magical unicorns have appeared and the world as we knew it has ended; Bragg will eventually get into more specifics, but, at the outset at least, it seems like your typical zombie apocalypse milieu, now (overly?) familiar from countless films, TV shows, and comic books. An alliance of unicorns and humans have set up a safe zone in Yellowstone National Park, which the unicorns have sealed off from zombies with an impenetrable forcefield generated by the magic of their horns.

Our heroine is Glitter, a spunky young unicorn who thrills on scouting missions. It’s on one such mission where she meets Kate, a young human girl with various tough girl signifiers (leather jacket, holes in her jeans, a baseball bat tipped with nails). Shortly after, Glitter’s world seems to fall apart, when the safe zone is attacked and overrun by zombie gnomes who have burrowed up underground (yes, gnomes, little red pointy hats and all).

Soon it’s just Kate, Glitter, Glitter’s fellow unicorns Blaze and Silver, and a big, black dog-like creature called a Grim, a servant of Death that the unicorns have managed to semi-tame with a magical collar.

Their journey in this volume mostly involves travelling from one settlement full of one sort of mythical creature to the next, having a little adventure at each. And so they encounter sirens on an island in a lake, vampires underground, Bigfoots in a snowy woods and pegasuses in the mountains. It’s not entirely clear from the comic if it is supposed to be set in a fantasy world where such creatures always lived openly alongside humanity, or if they are just now more visible because the world is ending and human beings are a dwindling presence.

Their travels are not entirely aimless, though. The older, eccentric Silver tells the others about Hooves of Death’s peculiar mythology. Apparently, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have set about ending the world. War’s war and Famine’s famine have already occurred (both of these Horsemen appear as characters within the comic), and the zombie plague is apparently Pestilence’s doing. Death is supposed to end it all, but apparently there was a deal between the last two, allowing Pestilence to stretch things out to increase the suffering of humanity.

Oh, and Kate is somehow the key to this all.

The sweep and scope of the narrative is quite epic—this first volume is 384 pages and, as a hardcover, it looks and feels like a brick—and Bragg is rather deft in her unveiling of new information, which keeps the episodic nature the book settles into from becoming too repetitive. Though there’s a lot of walking and a lot of visits to different settlements of fantasy creatures, it’s clear the book is going somewhere.

Bragg’s style is fairly simple and quite animated in both design and action (think of the cartoons of Genndy Tartakovsky, for example, or maybe The Powerpuff Girls or, yes, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic).

This allows for a pretty incredible range of emotive “acting” from the characters, and it’s also easy enough to fit such diverse creatures as unicorns, hellhounds, Bigfoots, zombies and zombie gnomes into the same world and have them all look like they fit.

Because it was a webcomic, Hooves of Death seems to have been created to read in an endlessly scrolling format and likely needed some rejiggering to make it work in the traditional book format, where one reads the story left to right horizontally, rather than up to down vertically.

I think HarperAlley did a pretty good job in this act of translation. There are occasionally panels that don’t seem to line up as smoothly as they might have—that is, one notices the layout at all, rather than gliding right through it without sparing it a thought—but for the most part it reads like a comic book that was meant to be a comic book. Only, you know, really, really long.

Bragg gets plenty of mileage out of that initial zombies vs. unicorns conceit, and the contrast between the rainbow magic of the heroes with the darker, grayer end of the world settings, but she happily quickly moves beyond it to tell a story that’s far bigger, weirder, and more fantastic than a simple mash-up of genres.

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