The first actual page of “The Stiff”, my webcomic from the 2000s that I’m currently re-posting (and continuing) on this website! At the moment I’m still working overtime on my comic for the “Anything That Loves” anthology, which should hopefully be done in a day or two.
This seems like as good a time as many to mention that I love horror and I love good zombie movies. There are so many great ones: Romero’s first two zombie movies, Cronenberg’s “Shivers,” “28 Days Later” (mostly), “Return of the Living Dead”…. I even liked Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake (despite its apoliticism — I was hoping for some social commentary but frankly, I think Romero has been trying to hard to be political in his old age) and I’m looking forward to this summer’s World War Z movie. Sure, it’ll be totally unfaithful to the book, but THOSE ZOMBIE SCENES. I don’t share the common prejudice against running zombies. Not to get all Rainbow Coalition, but there’s room for all types of zombies in this world. There’s plenty of reasons to dread WWZ, not counting unfaithfulness to the source material: for instance, the PG-13 rating, and the producers talking about how they left it open for a sequel, so you know the ending will have problems. Brad Pitt noted in interviews that they cut some scenes which were “too political”, which I wonder might be a reference to the Israeli-Palestinian scenes featured in the trailer (or, the apparently-cut scenes in which the characters speculate that the zombie plague originated in China?). I also have to admit that when I heard the movie was going to star Brad Pitt, somehow my mind translated that as “Nicholas Cage,” so until I actually saw Brad Pitt in the trailer I was expecting a Nicholas Cage vehicle instead of a Brad Pitt vehicle. So that was a relief.
Anyway, as a movie, rumor suggests it’s a huge mess, weighed down by the massive budget and massive profit expectations, but it looks ambitious, and I have to hand it to them for the FX. I have a feeling the FX department is the closest thing to a head to this headless production. The imagery of literal blob-like hordes of squirming zombies is pretty great, and reminds me of the Xombies series by Walter Greatshell. Or to quote from Lovecraft: “…a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime… spreading like a septic contagion… God knows how many there were – there must have been thousands. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms…”
Despite all my nitpicks, I definitely have to see that movie. Now back to comics.
NEXT UPDATE: Friday!