Mike Gold: Screw The Zombies!
OK, folks. It’s official. The zombie thing has gone on way too long. Time to stomp them back into the ground and move on.
Truth be told, and with all due respect to George Romero and Robert Kirkman, I was never much of a zombie fan. There’s not a lot you can do with the buggers, and even by stretching the rules and applying our contemporary wussification of the monster legends… there’s still not that much you can do with them.
There have been zombie stories that I’ve enjoyed, particularly Stan Lee and Bill Everett’s classic “Zombie!” from Menace #5, July 1953. Twenty years later this inspired something of a revival with Marvel’s black-and-white magazine Tales of the Zombie. Or, in other words, it took two decades and the combined talents of Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, John Buscema and Tom Palmer to finally come up with a worthy sequel.
This is not to say that all subsequent zombie stories sucked. Not in the least. But the massive proliferation of zombies throughout our mass media has, you’ll forgive the expression, choked the life out of the concept. By definition, zombies have no personality and not all that much to say. Their diet is really boring: only in St. Louis can the population stomach so much brain meat.
(I’ve eaten brains… once. Once. Believe me, it sounds better than it tastes. To quote musician Steve Goodman, “Even the cockroaches moved next door.” However, it is more palatable than goat’s head soup.)
As we continue to sashay through the 2013 convention season, it is tedious to see that so many cosplayers have chosen this motif as the subject of their craft. It doesn’t take long to glaze over the horde; if you’ve seen one hundred zombies, you’ve seen them all. And by the time my second show of this year’s convention season concluded, believe me, I have seen them all.
It’s time for something new.
Maybe something that’s actually… alive!
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
“Their diet is really boring: only in St. Louis can the population stomach so much brain meat.”
Hey! I resemble that remark!
AMEN, BROTHER.
I am so with you on this. I haaaaate zombies, honestly. The only zombie-related things I’ve enjoyed ever are:
a) Shawn of the Dead, and that had zero to do with the icky, icky zombies;
and
b) Walking Dead S1, and again, that was almost entirely due to Norman Reedus, not zombies. And the zombies are so blargh that I don’t think I even want to watch S2, despite Norman Reedus.
Well, and
c) Zombie Deadpool’s Head, but that’s because it still has a personality.
Zombies in and of themselves are totally boring, as well as being disgusting; and even when the human characters in the story are good, it’s hard to make the work good enough overall…because the zombies are still boring.
In short: ICK, ZOMBIES. GO AWAY.
Yep. Shawn of the Dead is great. There’s an analysis — I think it was of Mel Brooks’ work — that says when somebody makes a really good parody of something, it’s time has passed. This is not always true. Not ALWAYS.
Then again, Simon Pegg could read the phone book in Pig Latin and I’d probably like it.
I second that AMEN, Emily!!!!! I just don’t get the zombie thing.
And like you, Em, I loved SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but I’ve never gotten into that other graphic novel series that became a hit show on some cable station.
I wouldn’t be too quick to put any sub-genre out of its misery. If zombies seem like the dinner guest staying way way too long, maybe it’s just that the stories being told have become too derivative of one another.
I actually saw that as a challenge, and so had a spiffily original prose zombie-esque story published in Heavy Metal Magazine #260. Which has since led inadvertently to creating another entirely original spin on the premise that is now going to be made into a short film by a nice young filmmaker I met via the wreckamovie collaborative filmmaking site. Both stories involve zombies in ways that have never ever before been considered anywhere. At least not in print or on film. I am a devout believer in the line about Romero’s original being the last new thing to come from the horror genre period, regardless of medium. But I also believe that any rule can be re-written. :)
And every rule can be broken. As storytellers, it’s our job to try.