 |
Scooby Apocalypse
By Keith Giffen, Howard Porter and J.M. DeMatteis
DC Comics, 2/7/2017
12-17 Years
In this reboot of the original Scooby gang, four humans and a great dane stand alone against the zombie apocalypse. Daphne is a kick-ass, prototype military tech weapon-wielding leader; muscle-bound Fred, her assistant, keeps asking to marry him, Dr. Dinkley is an extremely successful scientist, and in her company’s employ, a dog-trainer named Norville Rogers (“Call me Shaggy”), and his new pet project, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. The Mystery Machine is also a military-style prototype and looks like the tank out of Romero’s Land of the Dead.
Scooby Apocalypse – Volume 1
(Collecting Issues #1-6)
Velma has called in the sensational reporting team of Daphne Blake and cameraman extraordinaire Fred Jones because the scientific project she’s been working on has gotten out of hand. Her four brothers have manipulated her nanite virus without her knowledge or consent.
The original intent of Project Elysium was to weed out man’s baser instincts– greed… anger… the urge to violence– providing the biological template for a more abundant and peaceful world.
Project Elysium: They had been planning to usher in a new age of mankind, where —
Velma releases the nanites herself. But it turns out “The Four,” her four older brothers, wanted to splice in the ability to take over the resulting planet of docile slaves.
They weren’t just weeding out the negatives in human nature, they were breeding in a kind of… passivity.
But instead of changing human instincts, the contagion mutates humans into monsters. Not just vampires, but abominations of life, creatures that eat humans.
On the experimental research team is Shaggy Rogers, who has taken to the companionship of one of the dogs they’ve been experimenting on. The dogs are getting brain implants that not only allow them to talk, but give them a higher intelligence. Scooby-Doo is his talking-dog friend.
They find themselves in a sanctuary deep below the research facility when the nanite virus hits the population. They have to fight their way out, but they have themselves been spared the nightmarish metamorphosis. People explode, friends try to eat them.
Grabbing the war-machine prototype dubbed professor Krebs’ Mystery Machine and a number of other pieces of hi-tech weaponry, the gang make it out alive, but find themselves under siege in a Mall-Mart store while stocking up on supplies.
As an epilogue, another of the dogs from the experiment is spotlighted. He is unhappy that his other compatriot canines have defective implants, but they are loyal followers. For some reason he has a hate for Scooby stuck in his craw. His goal: find Velma and get upgraded implants before they degrade and he becomes an animal again. …and to kill Scooby-Doo. His name? Scrappy. (Yeah, I know. Just bear with it. He turns into a werewolf.)
Scooby Apocalypse – Volume 2
(Collecting Issues #7-12)
Can Velma hack into the computers back at the sanctuary and figure out a way to either reverse or kibosh on the self-mutating virus? Was this a side-effect of the tampering The Four did with the genetic sequencing?
Scooby’s implants kick in, and his mild manner is replaced with a pack-defending bravado. Fred’s leg is broken by a creature when they make a break for it out of the Mall-Mart Superstore. The animosity between Daphne and Velma, who she believes is responsible for the end of the world, grows, while at the same time they seem to be bonding.
They encounter strange metamorphic effects of the nanite virus while getting hospital supplies for Fred. A mad doctor thing attacks. Velma has a dream where she is Queen of Monsterland and appears in a Red-Sonja outfit. This leads to her running off on her own to save humanity. Shag and Scoob track her down alone, but meet a bunch of Rat-Fink road warrior monsters that have mutated to join with their vehicles.
Now they need to find their way back to the Complex, or one of them. Velma will need a lab, and only one of The Four is left alive to ask. Rufus Dinkley, a crazed, brutally abusive sociopath with a toupee sits atop his self-named tower.
Scooby Apocalypse – Volume 3
The comic book continues…
