Toby Finch reads far too many comics and justifies this with the belief that you will in some way care about what hethinks of them. Please humour him.

11th April 2008.

The English language is a thoroughly splendid thing is it not? Whereas other languages remain fairly static and law-bound, our fabulously fluid mother tongue is free to do all sorts of wacky and wonderful things. Nouns can become verbs and vice-versa. Bits can be recklessly lopped off words and grafted onto the fronts, ends, and even middles of other words to make pleasingly outlandish hybrids. You can rhyme it, slang it, and pun it. Oh, the fun one can have!

Where is this all going, you ask?

Well, sometimes wrangling words together to make new ones isn’t just fun, it’s downright necessary. Take, for example, the case presented rather odiously to us by the common or garden Homo Revenirus, otherwise known as the ghoul or zombie.

Seems this foul-fragranced fellow can’t shamble anywhere without both figuratively and literally kicking up a stink. And a big stink at that. For zombies, as Shakespeare might have put it, come not as lone spies but in legions. Hence there’s no such thing as a zombie outbreak or even epidemic. It’s always a full-blown pandemic of the dratted things, which invariably leads to the fall of western civilization as we know it.

And here’s where our little language problem kicks in, because there’s only so many times you can say/write/read/hear the term ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ before it begins to look risible - well, more risible that it originally did anyway. But there’s so very many stories dealing with the Zombie Apocalypse across so many forms of media, that you just can’t help being obliged to use ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ over and over again. And what is more there’s no proper plural of ‘Apocalypse’; it’s always been generally assumed that one was more than enough.

So it is that artists and writers have had to get creative when referring to these Zombigeddons (to use my own unsubtle substitution). The best efforts in the last few years have come in the form of puns. From titles such as ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Flight of the Living Dead’, to designations of the actual events themselves as ‘Z-Day’ or ‘World War Z’, the solutions have been as amusing as they were ingenious.

But there’s one medium in which there’s just way too many Zombigeddons depicted for each and every one to get its own wryly attention-grabbing moniker. Try as they might with attempts ranging from the merely stupefying (‘Jesus Hates Zombies’) to the just plain stupid (‘XXXombies) there’s just not enough nifty names to go round.

And of course I hardly need to tell you which medium that is, for the truth is the zombies are all over the comic book industry like it was an all-you-can-eat brain buffet.

Seriously, those zany zombies are everywhere. There’s a spin-off, rip-off, cash-in and sell-out comic for each and every zombie story ever told, plus a mountain of new takes on the theme. Hell, even the Star Wars comics are currently staggering through an onslaught of ‘Rakghouls’ in their current crossover extravaganza. I will not attempt to compile an even half-way comprehensive list of all the other gruesome goings-on, since it’d be invalid as soon as it was posted, if not before, and also for the very good reason that I simply can’t be arsed. Every last possible scrap of zombie lore and trivia is hunted down and dissected ad nauseam. You can even find out what happened to Barbara after Night of the Living Dead (it involves crayons) and I bet you didn’t even know she survived, did you?

So why is it only now that the funny-book business has started to sit up and take notice, overcompensating for their years of inaction with a plague of the putridic?

Well, perhaps the most obvious reason is that we’re not so much reading and watching stories about Zombigeddon as we’re actually living it.

Now before you rush off to the toolshed to arm yourself with your blunt object of choice, perhaps I should explain myself with a bit of armchair anthropology.

Firstly, we’re tribal creatures, genetically programmed to live in a social network of at most a few dozen individuals - but every day we travel, work, eat and play alongside hundreds of people whose eyes we never meet, whose voices are a blur of sound. They are socially dead to us and they are everywhere.

Secondly, we’re designed to hunt and forage for our food and goods, not get them in exchange for special tokens granted to us by doing such things as driving white vans or guessing when the Bundesbank is going to add a quarter of a per cent to the interest rate (and sure as hell not by expounding spurious theories in blogs). We long to stop mucking about with money and just go and get what we want.

Between the horror of the former and the appeal of the latter lies the power and relevance of the genre. What a zombie apocalypse lets us do is actually start treating the concrete jungle as such.

But whatever the reason, there’s so many zombies in comics in these days that the superheroes must be feeling positively overwhelmed. In fact, some of them have decided that if they can’t beat them, they’d better join them.

The Marvel stable of costumed crime-fighters has always been a bit more down-and-dirty than their counterparts at other companies, and now they’re about as down and dirty as you can get. They have become the Marvel Zombies.

Well, sort of. In fact it’s not the characters we all know and love that have come over all groaning and gruesome, it’s some parallel universe versions of them.

Lest you think that this is just a cop-out, let me draw your attention to the fact that setting this story in its own separate continuity allows it lots of room to explode like a rotten eyeball in a phantasmagoria of gory possibilities. If you want to see Spiderman savage his damsel in distress instead of saving her, and if you want to see all his superhero pals do the same to the rest of the world, this is your one-stop shop.

It’s hard to imagine someone like, say, D.C. Comics allowing their own pantheon of powerhouses to do something like this even in jest, but Marvel does it with relish and that’s just one of the many reasons why I love them so much.

Hell, you can even get a Zombie Hulk action figure so you can see what gangrene looks like on somebody that’s bright green already.

At the other end of the spectrum, as far away from the broad farce of the above as it’s possible to get, there lies (or rather stalks) ‘The Walking Dead’.

This concerns itself with the ongoing horrors suffered by Rick, a policeman that wakes from a coma to discover the world’s gone to hell without him (and if this plot device seems derivative of ‘28 Days Later’ to you, please address all comments and complaints to ‘Day of the Triffids’ at 1951). Things start pretty damn bad and get rapidly worse from there, with moments of hope and happiness merely existing to set up the next grand disaster.

If you’re thinking this doesn’t sound like much fun, you’d be right – but this is a story to be enjoyed on a whole different level and for some very different reasons.

For a start, there are the shades of grey; both in the stark black-and-white art and in the moral ambiguities of the equally stark world it depicts.

Then there’s the fact that not only is Rick no all-conquering hero, he’s not even the hero of the story, instead functioning as a wandering point of reference used to bring other characters and situations into focus through his interaction with them. This is not of course to say that he’s not a well drawn (in every sense of the term) character, because he most certainly is. It’s just that this is a world now rotten through and through, and therefore one in which grand, saving-the-day heroism is not only impossible but inadvisable, with the only real triumph lying in the ability to survive from day to day.

In an art form blighted by unending machismo and empty bombast, this sort of thing is a desperately needed oasis of understatement and slow-burn storytelling.

In fact, it’s so good I recommend that you don’t read it. Seriously. Because due to the resonance stemming from either my pet theory above, or (as is much more likely) the sheer arresting artistry of the thing, reading it sometimes feels as much of a bare-foot walk across the bottom of hell as living it does for the poor characters. But by all means pick it up if you think you’re hard enough; if you want a great story greatly told, and don’t mind it breaking your heart.

Oh, and there’s one more reason to love this. Not only does it give great ghoul – no two deadheads are the same - but there’s swarms of swarms of flies. Zombies have always been depicted as walking bait-shops, but rarely has this larva-flow been carried through to its logical conclusion.

Speaking of logical conclusions, this looks like as good a place as any to call it a day of the dead. Besides, one can only wallow in the ‘funk of forty thousand years’- as Vincent Price in ‘Thriller’ put it- for so long without wanting to go have a nice cleansing shower and anything else but rancid meat to eat …which given the current state of my bathroom and kitchen might be a bit tricky…

TOBY.

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