final project part two

so i've been scribbling dialogue and hashing a story out of my concept.  still early stages.  considering turning it into a comic that is a few pages long.  did some sketches.  might do a painting to see if i like where it's going.  not quite sure yet.

final project

I'm pretty sure that I will be writing a play for my final project.  Most likely, it will be a one-act.  More details will follow as I get into the damn thing, but I've got a few pages of rough dialogue that I'm liking so far.

a life in pictures

It seems that comics have always been a part of my personal history.  I have been drawing as a long as I could hold a pencil and mixture of art and story that I found in comic books always appealed to me.  Like so many other things, my comic reading was a pool of the high and the low, the good and the bad, the resonant and the silly.  I came of age in the eighties with reprinted collections of Spider-man, Batman, Superman, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, Dracula,etc.  I didn't have a sense of continuity at that point and all were collections that I obtained from Superior's Public Library.  I read the pages of the same issues over and over again.  At some point I became aware that new stories were being printed and I'd pick them up from the grocery store magazine rack or, if I was lucky, we'd stop at Globe News and I'd get to go into the annex dedicated to comic books (both new issues and the back issues).  I still followed the same characters and added some based on what I could afford and what looked cool (there was a series called Solo Avengers that for a long time featured Hawkeye in a story in the first half and other characters in the second).  My brother and I both read G.I.-Joe for a long time too.  The artwork for the most part was the main draw for me, watching these stories unfold (if I just wanted to read a story I could go to any of the number of books that I owned--Point thrillers were big for me during elementary school, Stephen King and such filtered into my life during Junior High).

As I got older I thought I was getting more sophisticated in my tastes, but that was only marginally the case.  I was collecting.  I had my Death of Superman (#75 in black polybag)and my X-Men #1 (all 5 covers).  I was finding some cool stuff, but by this point it was the 1990s and Rob Liefield and Todd McFarlene pretty much had a stranglehold on style.  All new teams had at least one guy who looked like Wolverine and one who looked like a weird mash-up of Gambit and the Punisher.  There was a "hyper-realistic" style going on with lots of line shading and veins detailed into arms--but of course, most artists coming up were following either McFarlene's cartoonish proportions or Liefeld's complete lack of skill in drawing period.  During this time prices kept going up too.  I kept just justifying comics to myself during this period, but I still hadn't discovered any of the titles that I would later love and which would form a cornerstone of my support and continued belief in the form (believe it or not, I had not heard of Neil Gaiman at this point).  We're now in the mid-90's and one story-arch in my go to book kicked me out of comics for a lot of years:  Maximum Clonage in the Spider-man titles.  That was it.  I kept drawing and kept painting and held on to the nostalgic love of the characters, but I wouldn't buy another comic book for about eight years.

I graduated from college in 2002 and the comic book movies were in full swing with Spider-man and X-men getting into their sequel.  I rediscovered comics via graphic novels at Barnes and Noble.  I fell in love with Daredevil, Sandman, Alan Moore's stuff, and others.  I found the storytelling that I'd been looking for and not finding years earlier (regardless of how I wanted to believe that I had).  Now I keep up the best I can with what's new.  I read as much as I can, if not after I've purchased it, then in the bookstore.  I still draw.  I still paint.  I still love the high and the low.  And I still won't touch a book that Rob Liefeld had anything to do with--I have no idea how he has a career as a comics artist, he's awful!

the enemy is us

Zombies are definitely a catch all creature.  There is really no way to make them sexy or safe (I have seen them funny, but that comedy also involves some fear and disembowelment, so still--not safe), so they can stand for whatever fear we might have.  They are the other--standing in for racism, terrorism, consumerism, fear of disease ... the list does go on.  Most importantly thought, zombies are about us.  

There are a few things that I think are imperative to stories involving zombies:

1)  The survivors, the humans, are trapped in some way and forced to band together--whether they like it or not.  Being trapped isn't limited to being stuck in a single location like a farmhouse or a mall, it might also being trapped outside where the danger is omnipresent.  The key here is the being forced to rely on others, people who may be familiar or who may be strangers, to survive.  This is where we get to the juice in most zombie pictures because this is where we see both human frailties and nobility butt up against each other--pettiness becomes obvious, small details tend to carry greater resonance, and each moment could be the last one.  We see humanity in a microcosm and we see how humanity can fail and succeed depending on what elements of society we hold onto and what elements we abandon.

2)  Zombies are not only a fear of things that are different from us, but also of us.  Zombies are us.  They are family, friends and neighbors.  There is the constant threat that insufficient diligence or a momentary lack of focus can cause you to become one of them.  With other creatures such as vampires and werewolves, there is a continued consciousness:  you can still retain parts of you, even if part of you is now also a monster.  Vampires have an insatiable hunger, but they still retain personality.  Werewolves change into a beast, but at some point they still change back.  There is a duality in these creatures.  With zombies, it's an empty afterlife:  you are condemned to wander about without consciousness or a soul and eating other people without the promise of life after death, or even a peaceful nothingness after death because you are aware of what your body will be doing after you lose control of it.  In addition of the fear of what happens to you, it is also the continued pain of the multiple deaths of the people that you know.  You are now faced with their death, their undeath where they are attacking you, and the prospect of killing the body of someone you may have once cared about.

3)  There is the threat of plague.  Zombie origins (since Romero reinvented the creature) are deliberately vague.  No one is ever certain why the undead are suddenly everywhere, shambling or in some cases running after you.  So there is the threat of this disease of zombie-ism spreading unchecked without a cure.  This element made it easy for people to consider the "28 Days Later ..." and "28 Weeks Later ..." movies as zombie movies, even though these movies are straight up plague/ disease movies.  The metaphor still hangs comfortably around the zombie's shoulders--it is something that you can catch through a bite, through blood, through saliva.  That the zombie is decaying is also a signifier of disease and plague, the body is falling apart, and as I stated in my second point, it's a body that might be recognizable.

4) Finally, there is the fear of the other.  In "Night of the Living Dead" it starts with a few zombies around.  It seems like the threat is something that can be dealt with, it's small and manageable, but then quickly the threat multiplies.  They may be slow moving and without reasoning capabilities, but they are a legion.  They can't be easily killed because the bodies are already dead, and the numbers are suffocating.  The other--be it a person of another race, religion, or government--comes into the community.  One person is not a threat, if the community doesn't like what the other is presenting, the other can be dealt with, but as more arrive, suddenly the other has the majority and you are the one who is threatened.

So yeah, zombies are a catch all for what frightens us.  It's about situations getting quickly and completely out of our control.  It is our culture mirrored in a grotesque way and it is the worst of us magnified--on both the sides of the undead and the survivors.  Notice in any zombie movie, the remaining humans are always undone by themselves--greed, pettiness, carelessness, despair.  Zombies are often just the surrounding context for these human dramas to play out.