In the new Comics Journal, Michael Dean has an essay about the Marvel Zombies in which he says:
“Kirkman’s stroke of genius was to let his zombies talk, thus violating a rule that had been observed by virtually all of the many, many zombie incarnations that had come before. (The zombies in Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead evidently can speak but choose to exercise the ability sparingly, sticking largely to a one-word vocabulary — “Brains!” — and mimicking the speech of a paramedic calling for more paramedics. Similarly limited zombie conversation is also hinted at in Waid’s introduction of the characters into Ultimate FF.) Kirkman’s zombies are downright glib. In this world, the undead Marvel superheroes have been infected with not only a ravenous hunger for living human flesh but also a propensity for sarcastic banter. Even normally earnest characters like Iron Man and Captain America are full of bitter wisecracks in Marvel Zombies. The notion of zombies who can reflect and articulate a perspective on their distressing condition brings the genre to a whole other level of pathos and absurdity.”
This is pretty much exactly wrong. As Bataille discusses in Erotism, the whole point of violence is that it is silent. Language is what defines civilization; that which is outside language is barbarism. Bataille notes that barbarism and civilization are linked and not completely separable; two sides of a coin. And, of course, zombies are us, as Romero suggests over and over again. But still, the zombie genre is built around the idea that zombies, even as they are us, aren’t; they’re the repressed, non-speaking part of us; barbarism, violence, and so forth.
When zombies talk, they’re not zombies; they’re human beings. Yes, they’re murderous human beings — but there are a lot of human beings who are murderers. The problem with Marvel Zombies is that the characters are just super-villains, largely because they talk and wise crack. There’s nothing awe-inspiring or terrifying about them. To have a zombie talk is to not have a zombie. We’re back to idiotic super-heroics, except without a moral compass.
*****
I have lots more to say about the zombie genre here, if anyone’s interested….
Noah,
I am exactly wrong that Mark Waid had anything to do with introducing zombies to Ultimate FF. That would be Mark Millar. Whoops. As for the rest, I sympathize with your nostalgia for the old silent zombies, but for better or worse, you can’t fight zombie progress. There are all kinds of horrors, some talking (vampires, a Bush press conference), some silent. I can’t agree that talking necessarily renders the speaker mundane and nonhorrific. As I argued, what we have in Marvel Zombie is a particular kind of horror that intimately juxtaposes barbarism and civilization by placing the former in the shape of upholders of the latter — not as supervilains but as superheroes.
Not everything new is good; screwing with a genre can be a sign that you’re clever, or it can be a sign that you’re a clueless philistine. Some horrors talk; zombies don’t. There’s nothing dark about Marvel Zombies, except the admittedly depressing site of a couple of genres completely evacuated of their reason for being, shambling forward at the behest of corporate shills who don’t give a damn for the entertainment of man-boys who get a charge out of the puerile, costless defilement of their childhoods. It’s horror in the way that an advertisement featuring Toucan Sam is horrible — it’s a cultural production so empty that it seems like it can’t possibly exist. Yet there it is, taking up space. It pretty much defines crap.
It could work. I mean, I haven’t seen all of Jeff Brown’s wolverine vs. zombies battle, but it looked great, and managed to keep all the genre markers in place in a way that worked for both super-heroes and zombies. It seemed emotionally coherent and creepy and even scary. There’s no reason you couldn’t do a super-hero/zombie cross-over and make it work. But you’d need zombies who are zombies and super-heroes who are super-heroes, not bottom-drawer Freddie Krueger sequels tarted up in tights.
So when the creators of the Simpsons gave “Zombie Flanders” a funny line, they were committing an unforgivable sin against art?
They’re zombies because they’re risen and lurch after brains in a single-minded manner. Seriously, Noah, you sound like a “Batman” fan complaining about Adam West. Lighten up.
Adam West is great, and so are the Simpsons. I didn’t find Marvel Zombies especially funny. It seemed pretty much like insular in-jokes and mediocre fan scruff to me.
I mean, sure, it’s just a comic…but we’re all talking about it, so we must take it seriously to some extent, yes?
I suppose…but it being not just a comic book, but a comic book featuring both super-heroes and zombies, I took it seriously as an attempt at humor, but not much farther. I do appreciate that others can perceive more in it than that, though, and saying that the (at first, clever – at length, tedious, for me) juxtaposition of jibber-jabbering superheroes and the ravenous walking dead removes all “reason for being” from either of the genres being lampooned strikes me as a bit over the edge regarding what is, after all, a bad joke told at length (which sometimes is the best way to tell a bad joke – obviously all of our mileage varies).
Sorry, that should be “mileages vary”. I think.
And I agree that Adam West is great, and much funnier than Marvel Zombies (excepting the one sequence where they all look up at the Silver Surfer and yell “Get ‘Em.” I got a chuckle out of that.)