In this review of Bleeding Hearts #5, it’s time for Out-Break! But Poke’s not feeling it the way he used to, and Rabbit learns what betrayal feels like.
BLEEDING HEARTS #5
Written by DENIZ CAMP
Art and Main Cover: STIPAN MORIAN
Variant Cover: CHLOE BRAILSFORD
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: 6/10/26
This review contains spoilers
As Bleeding Hearts #5 begins, we catch up to Rabbit, where she and various other Live Ones are being kept in an old abandoned candy store. They’re being stored for the Out-Break ritual hunt.
Poke reflects on the importance of that day, and the festivities involved. He used to love it, but thanks to his newfound compassion, he can’t. But he also can’t help but wonder why his new friend and her mother left without their stuff.
And then he notices the ritualistic prey for this year.
From Rabbit’s POV, we learn that her mother’s been eaten by the zombies and Rabbit thinks that people always get eaten when she’s been bad. She’s wondering about the other survivors as well, and is being looked after by Ms. Ruby. But her innocence is well and truly dead.
Mush confronts Poke about why he’s been acting so weird lately, and the Live Ones he’d found. Poke thinks he can finally come out of the heartbeat closet. But it turns out that Poke thinks he’s been hoarding food. They agree to move past this, though, and go to join in the hunt as it begins.
The Live Ones are given a chance to run, and Rabbit sees Poke. She calls him out on betraying them as she runs, before the zombies themselves can give chase.
Bleeding Hearts #5 serves as another reminder of how much of a standout the series is in the zombie genre. In this one, we get a blend of both the worldbuilding part of zombie society, and the utter horror and heartbreak that comes from being a human trying to survive a world overrun by the undead.
On the world-building side, there’s Out-Break itself. They celebrate their founder/Patient Zero, by building a statue of him out of junk. They have music, with instruments like drums (with human skin), use bones as wind instruments, and organs that apparently make for a great bagpipe substitute. And admittedly, I cackled over the fact that they have a song in that world called “Sound of CEO Getting Chewed Out By Freshly Turned Employees”. I have a feeling that a song like that might be appreciated in more than just the zombie world (can we say “punk scene”?).
The human heartbreak is very much in Rabbit’s portions of the narration. When we first meet her, she’s aware that, yeah, bad things happen. But she’s still cute and cheerful, and still carries a lot of childhood innocence. But this is her breaking point.
She has, at this point, made friends and seen all of them die. She’s had both of her parents become zombie chow. She figures that she’s got to be the common denominator and that they died because she was “bad”. All she was doing was acting like a young kid: crying when she was really little, and undoubtedly upset, trying to be friendly to everyone, including a zombie (who, as we’d seen, was actually looking out for them)… She and her mom couldn’t even be faulted for holing up in the school, really; her mom had a broken ankle and that’s not really great for running.
The broken ankle may also be a reason that her mother had been eaten in the time between Mush catching up to them and when this installment picks up. They were brought in specifically to be hunted for Out-Break, and if someone’s hunting down prey, it’s best if said prey is in peak physical condition. Since she was damaged goods, however, she may have been seen as fair game.
I enjoyed a few of the details here…the holding area being an old candy store called “Sweet Bites” is a nicely dark little joke. And the fact that Out-Break is generally held in an abandoned mall? Pretty clear reference to Romero’s work (specifically “Dawn Of The Dead”). When one of the survivors is eating some of that not-in-peak-condition candy, the way it sticks in his mouth evokes the image of a zombie. And that brings to mind “The Walking Dead”, anytime parallels between the Walkers/Biters/Insert-regional-name-for-zombies-here and Humanity comes up.
So now, we’ve got the hunt coming up, and with Rabbit feeling broken by what she sees as a combination of her own fault and Poke/Flower-Boy’s betrayal, and Poke’s compassionate side that he’s trying to keep hidden, issue 6 is sure to be intense.
Final Thoughts
Bleeding Hearts continues to be a standout in the zombie genre, providing us with a lot of heart, excellent world-building, while still having a beautifully dark humor to it. The drama and world-building aspects are both working wonders for what’s already a fun title, and I’m eager for the next chapter.
