Loving the Dead

Zombies may be cold in the grave, but they’re hot in today’s popular culture. From video games like Dead Rising to books like Max Brooks’ World War Z, it seems that any product featuring zombies sells better than warm brains at an undead cookout.

A quick glance at the racks in Captain Lou’s Comics gives an indication of the way zombies have conquered comic books. The Walking Dead is generally accepted as the best of the current onslaught, drawn in black and white to match its stark storyline. Over 50+ issues, writer Robert Kirkman has developed a world where flesh-eating zombies already have the upper hand and only a few fucked-up humans survive to bite each other’s heads off.

Aside from the gore and the taut storytelling, the comic’s succeeded because the characters seem real. They make believable decisions, even in the face of something as unbelievable as an undead epidemic.

Senseless slaughter. Bullet-to-the-head executions. Hordes of bad guys bent on our destruction – or assimilation. Are these evils really so unbelievable or are they a fact of life? Part of the monsters’ popularity comes from their power to reflect contemporary culture and the way we view the world. In the ‘60s, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead took some of its gruesome, apocalyptic inspiration from televised images of the Vietnam War; while they’re holed up in an isolated house, the heroes of the film watch their society disintegrate via a TV set.

Decades earlier, director James Whale undoubtedly derived some of Frankenstein’s dark humor and stitched-together visuals from his personal experiences of scarred soldiers from WWI. More recently, Joe Dante used Homecoming, a segment of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, to dramatize “this elephant in the room, this Iraq war.” Set during an election year, dead veterans of the War on Terror drag their khaki-clad asses out of the graves to the polls, voting out a president who sold them a war on the basis of "horseshit and elbow grease."

The same atmosphere of doom, gloom and rising from the tomb that informs blatantly political films like Homecoming and Romero’s Land of the Dead is present in most of the recent batch of pessimistic zombie flicks. But more than anything else, there’s the sense that our technologically obsessed, fast-moving world is crying out of for savage shambling ghouls to remind us what’s really important in life: the freedom to live, breathe and get some goddamned personal space.

Take a look at Night of the Living Dead and its many (mostly Italian) imitators. A small group of people are stuck in the middle of nowhere with little chance of rescue. Slowly, an increasing number of stumbling, starving, groaning, faintly recognizable bodies bust into the house, forcing them back further and further from the front door until they’re stuck in a little corner (or the cellar, or the attic), trapped in surroundings that are usually familiar and comfortable. It’s like your extended family coming to visit for Thanksgiving, giving you no peace and eating you out of house and home. Except this time, you’re the turkey.

In an overpopulated world, peace will become increasingly hard to come by. So it’s no surprise that our crowded planet is welcoming the zombie mythos. Even the Marvel superheroes have got in on the act, winning their comic book publishers a notable share of the macabre profits. In the alternate dimension of Earth-2149, Spiderman, Captain America and their pals have all been infected with an alien virus that transforms them into the Marvel Zombies, superheroes who’d rather eat your liver than save the day. In the hands of writer Robert Kirkman (again), even our coziest childhood idols pose a threat to our survival.

Not all of Marvel’s reanimated corpses are as greedy for flesh. In 1973, the company sought to expand its range of black and white horror magazines to cash in on the then-present craze for movie monsters. In an early example of modern narrative retrofitting, the developers of Tales of the Zombie took a short 1950s strip by Stan Lee and added a top and tail, expanding the character of Simon Garth. Garth was a greedy, selfish workaholic; not typical star material for a comic book.






To make things even tougher for the writers, after his murder and rebirth Garth could feel nothing and cared about nothing. Why would he? He was dead. But the voodoo-charged adventures of Garth, told from the tenacious monster’s point of view, were strangely captivating and Garth has been revived for a new miniseries this year.

It will be interesting to see how Garth, who owed more to the revenging cadavers of EC Comics than today’s brand of body biters, will be reevaluated and made relevant for current readers. Zombies as a concept have been around for a long time – they’re in the millennia-old Epic of Gilgamesh – but it wasn’t until Romero decided to give his corpses a craving for flesh and the ability to expand their numbers through their bites that we got the creatures that we know and love to blow the heads off of today.

Perhaps it’s their zen qualities that we admire so much. Zombies don’t have to control themselves or be civilized. They give in to their base urges: hunt, feed, lurk. Peter Dendle is associate professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, and he’s made it his mission in life to know all about zombies and their social context. He thinks that their contagious nature is their real hook. They herald an apocalypse where we must struggle to survive, paranoid that the next person round the corner could give us a hickie we’ll never recover from.

Whatever the reason for our zombie obsession, there’s no question that the genre taps into our fears that the world will end, or that we’ll lose the people and things around us that we love. That’s a frightening enough concept to keep us coming back again and again to read more books and watch more movies where the dead refuse to rest in peace.


This love letter to walking corpses first appeared in the Charleston City Paper.