This isn’t to say that 28 Weeks Later, sequel to the excellent 28 Days Later, was made purely out of a love of money, although rumored plans for a third movie in the series suggest otherwise. It would surely be unfair to believe the filmmakers had no interest in making a good movie – and, admittedly, the film has its strengths. But 28 Days Later wasn’t a movie that needed a sequel. The story of an almost instantaneously contagious virus that infects people with rabid cannibalism was remarkably self-contained. The survival drama reached a natural end almost as much thanks to the film’s conception of the virus – the infected, unable to nourish themselves, die of starvation – as due to the end of the characters’ journey.

But beyond standing on its own, what really gave 28 Days Later the gold star was reaching a balance in its character study of humanity under duress. We saw the best of humanity and the worst, the heroic and the horrific, which is far closer to reality than rosy-spectacled happily-ever-after films or their rebelliously bleak counterparts. 28 Weeks Later, puffed up by delusions of allegory, veered off the course set by its predecessor and indulging instead the tedious bourgeois nihilism that remains impressed with the observation that good doesn’t always triumph over evil. Cardboard characters, gore for its own sake, clichéd (read: predictable) action that only occasionally delivers the goods, and more plot holes than lies in an election campaign; these dealt the blows that made the film merely a passable, and ultimately irritating, thriller instead of, well, 28 Days Later.

So if it’s hard to figure what purpose, from a storytelling point of view, 28 Weeks Later serves, it’s well-nigh impossible with the comic book 28 Weeks Later: the Aftermath. Written by the increasingly legendary Steve Niles and beautifully illustrated by multiple artists, this tie-in to the movies is more vacuous than valuable. The easiest complaint is that it really is a comic book rather than a graphic novel. It’s a snooty distinction, to be sure, but to be frank, there’s a real difference between the literary quality of a V for Vendetta or Long Halloween and the average issue of any given comic series. Those differences involve everything from layered plots to complex characterizations and rich drama, none of which are on hand to make The Aftermath shine.

There are four stories that make up this attempt to flesh out 28 Days Later and lead into 28 Weeks Later. Two of these are straightforward survival scenarios; one involves a family at the beginning of the rage outbreak and the other involves a lone well-armed survivor whose frayed sanity has unfortunate consequences. Neither of these present dramatic situations we haven’t seen done better in 28 Days Later.

Of the remaining two, one presents the creation of the rage virus. That it involves a familiar scientists-gone-wild scenario, complete with a Herbert West disregard for things like the scientific method (not to mention the protocols used for handling infectious diseases), suggests an answer in search of a question. While the story strains to emphasize the allegory of ideology as virus, it merely repeats a one-note and largely irrelevant song – does it really matter how the virus came into existence?

Finally, there’s the book’s last story, which finds characters from the previous chapters in a military quarantine. Not only is this the lead into 28 Weeks Later, it embodies the film’s very same faults and flawed, half-conceived ideas – only with considerably less plot or action. Where 28 Days Later used the rage virus as a convenient gimmick to justify the zombies, focusing the plot instead on the human drama, this fourth chapter suffers especially from the schizophrenia that comes from the attempt to present a survival horror-drama through the ethics of handling the outbreak of highly infectious disease. But without any debate or discussion about whether the military might actually be justified in using desperate measures to contain a virus so virulent it spreads incredibly fast – the military is simply presented as an unthinking force just as bad as the zombies – we get a skewered non-lesson in ethics that sabotages rather than enhances the aforementioned human drama. For the opposite, it’s far better to rent the thrilling and more plausible Outbreak, a film whose story is all about attempts to contain a mysterious and deadly disease.

The back of the book brashly states that 28 Days Later was merely the beginning of the end, implying that The Aftermath and 28 Weeks Later are a continuation of that end. If this is a reference to the money in our wallets, the statement is regrettably spot-on.