I’ve been asked by fans if I would ever have any interest in writing fiction about zombies. And I’ve always said absolutely not. I found zombies boring and one-note and couldn’t imagine what I’d do with them.
Then Marvel needed me to step in and write the last three issues of “Marvel Zombies Destroy.” And the concept was simple: World War II Nazi zombies. I thought, “How could I possibly pass that up?” Still, I was worried that I didn’t have the proper mindset for such endeavors.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Except now the fact that I needn’t have worried, in and of itself, worries me, considering some of the truly sick stuff I came up with. And even worse, I had fun doing it. It’s oddly liberating, from a storytelling point of view, to have a character get disemboweled and then use his own intestines as a weapon against his attacker. Although I did avoid the obvious dialogue line of, “That took guts!” Even with zombies, some things are just too much.
PAD
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Mmmh. Two monsters of popular culture reunited in one title. Definitely I have to see that.
What? You didn’t have the stomach for that pun?
Maybe he didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to de-liver such a bilious play on words. It sounds like his heart just wasn’t in it. Anyway, I’m sure there are better ways to flesh out a story than silly puns, and I’m sure that, with Peter David as the brains behind this project, there will be plenty more opportunities for gut-busting humor coming a-lung directly. I doubt I need to ex-spleen my perspective further, so I’ll just say goodnight, and I promise, I’m only kidney-ing around here.
I think we’ve been pun-ished enough, Jay.
It’s about dámņëd time you got your head screwed on straight. Now where’s my Peter David authored zombie novel? Come on, man, you’ve got at least one Shaun of the Dead level story in you (or maybe even a serious zombie horror.)
*meh* Writing blood & guts horror is easy.
Comedy? Now that’s hard!
It’s not the same thing?
“*meh* Writing blood & guts horror is easy.”
Proving that you don’t understand quality zombie films and stories.
Go buy the book World War Z from your local bookstore or, if you’re the busy type, get the five CD audio book of it with full cast readings by the likes of Alan Alda, Mark Hamill, Carl Reiner, Henry Rollins, Jürgen Prochnow and John Turturro among others. You can get the CD set for $12.75 here – http://www.deepdiscount.com/book/World-War-Z_9780739366400
And don’t wait for the film version of WWZ. It’s shaping up to look like complete and total crap.
Actually, I said blood & guts horror – which zombies don’t *necessarily* fall into. You can do psychological zombie horror. I really don’t like blood & guts. If I have to see deaths, I kinda prefer them as nice deep space explosions or something like that, mostly off screen.
I like Orson Scott Card – he does excellent horror stuff.
Yes, but, Tara, you are going to buy a copy of WWZ, right?
I’ll probably do a Kindle Sample, if one is available. It’s *really* not my thing.
Have a look at Romero’s classic DAWN OF THE DEAD, then force yourself to take in the awful, AWFUL remake and see if you can still say that.
Man, you had to go there…
I love my Living Dead films and I love George, but Dawn, as much as I love it, is dated and more than a little stilted. The foundations are strong, but someone seeing it for the first time now is going to see more of its flaws than its strengths.
And the remake is hardly “awful.” It’s popular and cool in zombie fandom circles to trash it and even more to trash running zombies (unless those running zombies are in Return of the living Dead or the original Dawn of the Dead) but it’s actually a pretty dámņëd good film with some solid human moments in it and some well thought out bits.
Can’t help it. Saw it with a big zombie genre fan and, by the time we were done he had to sit down and write a critique of it. It was eight pages long, and almost all of it negative, from “where the heck did the little zombie girl come from? If she was their daughter, how did she get bit without their knowing and if she wasn’t, how did she get into the house?” to “Why are they leaving a well-stocked fortress for … who knows what?” At least in the original the fortress was no longer tenable with the bikers smashing their way in. In the new one? Just lock the door to the basement [or stack heavy furniture in front of it]. End of problem. And where did that toilet come from they heaved through the glass pane? Just far too many “What the *&#%???” moments in the remake.
I used to feel the same way about the zombie genre. “Day of the Dead” first got me interested, but to be honest,it wasn’t until “The Walking Dead” that I truly began to appreciate it.
Zombies weren’t even on my radar until “The Walking Dead” (the TV show–still haven’t read the comic). Now I catch myself evaluating every building I wander through on the basis of its suitability for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Perhaps now that zombies have tickled Mr. David’s fancy, Cowboy Pete might take an interest in the show?
WALKING DEAD is better than most I’ll grant, but I wish the author hadn’t decided he would NOT explain how things came to be the way they are. We’d just have to accept it’s a show about how humans are coping with the situation. The trouble is, I can’t. We’re shown a Main Battle Tank in the city in the first episode. If you’ve got that kind of firepower, zombies aren’t much of a problem unless you’re the most inept military commander since the guy who led the Light Brigade. Yeah, there are LOTS of zombies. Fine. You’ve got armour, miniguns firing thousands of rounds a minute, mortars, flame throwers … those will go far to even the odds. Look at WW I where thousands of infantry tried to run up against machine gun emplacements. Guess who won?
Actually, Max Brooks did a hëll of a job explaining why such a confrontation in a major city would go downhill fast in the first Todd Wainio (spectacularly voiced by Mark Hamill on the CD version) section.
Interestingly, much of the logic you employ is exactly the thinking that would cause such a confrontation to go from bad to worse pretty fast.
yep. Weapons designed to wound and bleed an enemy to death will do jack diddly squat against non-bleeding combatants who feel no pain. hey, blow their legs off–now you have to worry about the crawlers as well as the walkers. Flamethrowers? You know what’s worse than a zombie? A flaming zombie! How long would it take a body on fire to be reduced to ashes, because that’s how much time it would have to keep stumbling toward you with it’s burny body.
Hand grenades? Won’t do šhìŧ, except for the occasional lucky shrapnel head shot.
I see it pretty much like the battle of Isandlwana. Going real well right up to the point where the zachs break through, then all hëll breaks loose. and it gets dark. And you get tired. But they don’t.
The lights will go out. Nobody leaves their homes. The food runs out in 3 days and nobody is driving any more in. Fires start. There’s nobody to put them out. at the breaking pint the cities survivors make a run for it and as they are jammed into mobility on the bridges become the world’s most horrible all you can eat buffet.
An enemy that grows with each death and is 100% committed to a degree of total war that Goebbels only dreamed of…yeah, it would be bad. Especially in the cities. And if you accept the Romero/Walking Dead premise that each and every one of us will become a zombie upon death…that’s game over for civilization
It wouldn’t take long for trained military to see head shots work just fine. They’ve got the ammo to spare. Too, bases tend to be surrounded by heavy fencing. Unless the zombies start to use wire cutters, they’re not getting in any time soon – good time to open up with flame throwers. Meanwhile the troops can take their time taking them out at range. Finally, unless the zombies are mystical in nature, in which case we’re all screwed, they will eventually die as they run out of food/energy. Just wait them out in facilities meant to survive wars for weeks or months.
“It wouldn’t take long for trained military to see head shots work just fine.”
Flaw #1: Define “wouldn’t take long” a little better. An hour? A day? A few days? Maybe a week? How many military encounters fall under the umbrella of “wouldn’t take long” as you see it? You’re also I think not taking into account just how big an army of the undead in a city like Atlanta would be and just how reduced our response capabilities may already be at the outset.
The Walking Dead has two things in common with George Romero’s world.
(1) The origin of the outbreak is unknown and didn’t appear to start as an isolated incident that would imply a patient zero scenario. You had people around the globe falling ill to some mysterious malady as well as the dead all over the world beginning to rise right after death.
(2) Any death, even mundane death without a bite, creates a zombie.
This presents you with a few issues from hour one. For one thing, most people will have no idea about what’s going on. People wouldn’t know what the hëll a zombie is and, even if you decide that people would have them in popular fiction and thus know, no one is going to take the idea of zombies seriously at first. If you see someone staggering down the street of a major city after nightfall (or even during the day in some areas) you’re going to think that they’re drunk or ill. You’re not going to see someone lumbering along and cap them between the eyes because you just knew that they were a zombie. Even if you run into one of the initial undead in a city setting and that thing attacks you and bites you, you’re simply going to assume it was a nut on drugs. You might have a doctor look at the bite, but you might not if it’s more a nip than a bite. So now you and hundreds or thousands like you go home, maybe to wives/husbands and kids, and go to sleep that night feeling a little ill.
And then you die and change. And after changing you attack the people near you. Maybe you live in a neighborhood. Maybe you live in an apartment complex. Maybe the people you live with are the only victims you can easily get to. Maybe your apartment complex will become a bad place between you and others like you. Either way, a few hours later you have a nice army of living dead building up.
Hospitals will become a death zone. As the population becomes seriously ill, they’ll either go to the hospital under their own power or be taken by loved ones or emergency responders. You’ll suddenly have a serious outbreak on your hands in that hospital. And, double trouble, most hospitals will at least continue to draw the sick and the injured for a couple of hours after they’ve fallen and they are mostly situated in downtown locations. So on top of downtown and city apartment dwellers and the local homeless population turning, you now have additional population coming into the city from outside areas to get care for this mysterious illness at the big modern hospital in the city. Oh, and we can’t forget downtown campuses with dorms. Gonna have some outbreaks there as well. A major city is going to fall fast and become an undead army in the thousands rather quickly.
And your military powers are going to take a hit as well.
Some of the initial population that gets mysteriously sick and dies will be in your military. Not only will this reduce you numbers by just that fact, but you will have outbreaks on bases as well. You also have to deal with the fact that many bases near cities and high population areas are open bases. In the initial phase of an outbreak, the time before anyone realizes what is happening, you’re going to have the odd lone walkers or groups of zombies stagger onto a base. They’re going to nip a few people, soldiers, the family of soldiers or civilians on base, and either kill them outright or increase the size of the coming day’s outbreak on the base.
This means you’re dealing with two issues by the time you pull your šhìŧ together for your first organized military operations. (1) You’re already likely dealing with a zombie population in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in major cities. (2) You’ve likely already lost a noticeable percentage of your military before the first real battle with the undead. Given these two facts, it’s not unreasonable to believe that a first encounter in a city like Atlanta would have your ratio of soldiers to zombies at one hundred zombies for every soldier if not one thousand zombies for every soldier. And that leads us to…
“They’ve got the ammo to spare.”
No they don’t. They have the ammo they have. Certainly they should be able to set up a supply line in country more easily than they can for major engagements in other countries, but they still only have the ammo they have on hand. They’re going to blow through ammo pretty easily in first encounters; especially in a world without zombie fiction where the headshot rule has to be discovered in trial by fire. Before that, and maybe for a while after that, you’re going to have people wasting ammo left and right on shots that don’t take out the brain.
Even large weapons like tanks aren’t a sure bet. An explosive shell will hit a crowd of zombies and the shrapnel will take out a few brains, but it won’t put down any zombie that doesn’t get shrapnel in the brain. Whereas such a shell going off in the middle of an enemy army would mean a small group of men flying about and landing dead in heaps, a group of zombies will have a few go down for good but far more getting back up again to crawl or walk again towards the living.
Machine guns, either hand held or heavy duty mounted ones, will send hundred of rounds towards a horde very quickly. Most of the rounds will do jack all other than pass harmlessly through already dead and useless organs and muscle tissue. You may see some of the dead fall from repeated hits, but those without head shots will simply stand once again and continue their march.
And, frankly, this is going to fûçk with soldiers and volunteers mentally. Most human minds are not going to react well to seeing major weaponry that they know will take down dozens of men in one blow have only minimal effect on an enemy coming at them; especially when that enemy is already of such a nature that people’s minds would be freaking out to a degree anyhow. You’re going to have panic and mistakes and that is going to lead to even more wasted ammo.
You also have to factor in the concept that a lot of ammo and general munitions are manufactured in civilian factories. If civilian areas fall quickly in the early stages, you are going to see the need to conserve ammo until you can set up new manufacturing centers. plus, what resources you might have to get ammo or food will be hit by looters in the early days. Some may be stopped, but you are going to lose resources to the looters. There’s just no way around that.
“Too, bases tend to be surrounded by heavy fencing. Unless the zombies start to use wire cutters, they’re not getting in any time soon –”
Except, again, most bases are open. They’re not going into full lockdown until after the outbreak is declared and by then you’ll likely have issues from both outbreaks that started on base and those zombies that staggered in before everyone realized what was going on. Certainly the bases could be secured, but you will not have the full complement of soldiers at the ready that you once had by the time you get your bases under control.
“– good time to open up with flame throwers. Meanwhile the troops can take their time taking them out at range.”
Uhm… No. A burning zombie is not a dead zombie. Now they’re a major threat to anyone they encounter for two reasons. You’re also going to create a threat that’s maybe as great zombies at your gate. A burning and blinded zombie is going to keep moving. It may go into an area you don’t want exposed to flame and start a bit of a blaze outside your fence line. That bit of a blaze might well turn into a roaring, out of control fire. There are no fire departments to come to put the fire out and if you have one on base you have to open the gates and expose yourself to zombies getting at your men outside your gates or even getting in.
Not an ideal situation to put yourself in.
Also, you’re giving up defending the cities if you’re locking yourself behind the fences of your bases. While you’re sitting there hoping to ride it out, the armies of the undead outside your gates and across the land are growing. All that gunfire and nose is going to draw a lot of zombies to you from a long way away and keep them coming. Before you know it, you’re going to have armies at you fence.
You may actually have more than your fence and gates can structurally hold out against. They might just flatten it. Barring that, between the dead you kill at your perimeter and the dead that get crushed against your perimeter by the continuing hordes of undead coming; you’ll have an undead ramp in no time. The only way to stop this is to open your gates and expose your men and your security to the undead in continuous operations to clean the dead undead from your perimeter.
And, again, while you’re hiding behind your gates and dealing with this, your cities, like Atlanta in TWD, are falling. And, and this is a biggie, the scales will only tip in their favor numbers-wise for a good long while. If you kill a zombie, you get a non-animated corpse. If one of your people die, you get zombie. If a zombie dies, you decrease their numbers but do nothing to help yours. if your people die, your numbers drop and the zombies gain new soldiers. Not a great scenario in the early weeks and months for the humans.
“Finally, unless the zombies are mystical in nature, in which case we’re all screwed, they will eventually die as they run out of food/energy. Just wait them out in facilities meant to survive wars for weeks or months.”
Might be a long wait. Even in stories where the dead are not explained to be rising from mystical means, the dead seem to see their decomposition retarded by whatever is animating them. And in some areas, the climate will help to retard that process even more. Plus, it’s not like 28 Days Later where the living infected by a rage virus starve after weeks. These are creatures that are driven to eat but need no actual food to survive. They won’t starve, they won’t tire, they won’t sleep, they won’t break mentally from stress or strain and they won’t stop. That’s not something you can say about all of the remaining human population.
Plus, you are going to have phases here. You will have populations that last longer than others. It’s not going to be a matter of all of your zombies start in week or month one and that’s it. You could have small outposts of humans here and there fall over a span of months. That means that you have fresh zombies popping up for months even as your army tires, stresses and loses numbers.
Plus, you have to factor in the simple fact that we are not a society that is designed to survive an event like this. We depend on electricity, open roads, modern conveniences, fully stocked food and clothing stores and refrigerators to handle the food we buy that’s not canned. Most people I know couldn’t grow food if their lives depended on it and almost as many are lousy hunters and fishermen. We laugh at the people that go on reality TV shows and struggle to make a fire or live without modern conveniences, but that would be our life after about a week or two. And let’s be honest here, most modern Americans would die just based on that alone.
And the dead would become more of the undead.
And we’re not even touching on the insanity and the panic in the population in the first few weeks. You want to feel secure that your bases and safe zones will hold against the undead? What about the scared and the desperate living? At some point, a military base or secured safe zone will hit a point where it cannot take on more people without threatening it’s safety and sustainable resources. At that point, you have to turn people away. How long before the desperate masses decide that you’re hanging them out to die and decide that they’re forcing their way in to your safe zone/base?
And, for that matter, do you even accept people on to the base in the earl days of the outbreak? To do so would risk letting the sick and injured via zombie bite into your safe zone and behind your wall of defenses. That means that you’re setting up an outbreak in the middle of your base. Decide to cut people off early and you have even more living attacking you to find safe refuge in the early days.
Theoretically, a mass outbreak like this would be very near an extinction event. We would be almost wiped out before we would be able to regroup, rethink, retool and maybe take back the world that was once ours. It would be very possible to do, but it would be a hëll of a fight and it would be decades after that before we were even close to back to “normal” in our day to day life.
Very much looking forward to this. Zombies are like the joke “the Aristocrats”. We all know the setup and punchline. It’s all in the telling.
Gggrrrr…..aaarrrgghhh
(zombie for “Thank you for your apology. Those of us suffering from mortality issues feel very strongly when someone in the media targets us for criticism. We heartily accept your apology and look forward to….BRAINS!!!! Ahem, look forward to your future endeavors.)
If you want a ton of zombie humor/sick humor/sick puns, check out the game MUNCHKIN ZOMBIES from Steve Jackson Games http://www.worldofmunchkin.com/munchkinzombies/ This has everything from a Firmly Attached Doberman and the weapon Your Own Pancreas and/or Spleen, to Make Humerus Comments and use bowling items as weapons! And the expansion ARMED AND DANGEROUS continues the wonderfully twisted humor!
In your head, in your head, they’re fighting…
No need to argue, dude…
Great Cranberries riff, Michael. Now I have the tune stuck in my head. Aargh.
I honestly don’t see the appeal of zombies. At all. They gross me out, I find the idea unpleasant at best, and absolutely depressing when applied to characters I’ve always loved.
Then again, I’ve never enjoyed post-apocalyptic stories of any type (I even hate Days of Future Past…). Heck, the post-apocalyptic scenario nearly ruined Power Rangers RPM for me (Yes, they had post-apocalyptic Power Rangers… And it actually won me over.), and it’s HARD to ruin Power Rangers for me (fan since ’93!).
I was never a fan of zombies until world war z. Think of them as similar to the martians from war of the worlds, or diseases in plague stories; it’s not about them as characters, it’s about how humans can become noble or vicious during intensely difficult events. (I also liked “Dead Eyes Open” because I was waiting for someone to try zombies as persecuted minorities.
I would be perfectly fine if you added that line right back in. Surely there must be time, right?
When’s issue #1 (I don’t you didn’t write the first two but I’ll get all of it for the sake of completion)
Note that other Marvel writers have not had the same restraint. I’m thinking of an issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON, around #190. The might have still been written by Steve Englehart, or it might have been written by others (it was directly before Jack Kirby took over the reigns for about 2 years). Tony Isabella either edited it, or wrote it (if Englehart didn’t).
Cap is fighting a robot. There’s a two-part caption (at least one of which is attributed to the editor) with names for the robot – one of which is “Kid Bolt, Outlaw”. The other one may have been worse….