When Paul Grist said he wasn't writing for the trade, he meant it: the trade ends like every other issue of Mudman, with a cliffhanger leading up to a resolution. Those endings are fine for single issues of a comic, which are expected to be parts of a continuing story, but books are expected to be complete narratives, even when they are part of a series. I fear that not leaving readers with a satisfying conclusion will turn off readers who don't frequent comic shops, but maybe I'm underestimating their ability to know good comics storytelling when they read it. Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong.

"I wish the creators would have done more with that," would actually be a good summary of how I felt about the book. After pop culture stops caring about the undead and all the cool kids are writing Quetzalcoatl slash fiction and rolling in cash, only the best zombie stories will survive. Alex Link and Riley Rossmo had some really good ideas here, and if they had taken those ideas and just went balls-out with them, Rebel Blood could have been great. 

I don't mean to criticize Brian Fies for not being a brilliant essayist. What I mean to say is that Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? doesn't hold up as an essay; it needed to be a story. A story could have explored the differences between the spirit of the post-WW2 generation and the modern day without being declarative. With fully realized characters we could have experienced the wonder of the prototypical television and the moon landing, and felt that hope for the future ourselves, instead of having the experience explained to readers and expecting them not to question it.

Dan Nadel points out in his introduction that it's Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson's work for EC that would make them famous, not their work for Forbidden Worlds, and the stories are just simple, poorly made plots without any feeling or humor behind them. Why would anyone read this? Or, more specifically, is there some desire for art that blandly upholds the status quo? Does boring yet reassuring art fill some need for its consumers, in the same way that horror, comedy, and tragedy do? I ask because that's what Forbidden Worlds is, and I can't imagine any other reason why this magazine would have survived as long as it did if this need didn't exist.