Here’s the question: how safe do you feel when social oppression teams up with wank material?
Zombie Tramp. About a woman who is now a zombie, and her sex adventures as a murdering prostitute (previously on Free Comic Book Day as a murdering hitch-hiker). It’s a comic about “sexy breasts” and dismissing basically all forms of human life. The line drawing is sort of nice, sometimes (as left) the cartooning’s cute. It’s a shame it’s used for objectification, because this is not a character study, it’s not a piece that “admires” more than one type of woman’s body, and it’s about protagonist Janey swinging her breasts at men until they follow her to a place she can privately/sexily murder them wearing skull-shaped pasties.
I don’t like the way that Zombie Tramp plays off the worst excesses of the 90s bad girl shit. Lady Death made comic shops unwelcoming then, detached me from my body, and Zombie Tramp covers exist in 2014’s patriarchal American comics industry and say nothing beyond “rub your genitals while you look at this comic.” They tell you, “hey: self-congratulatory sex.”
So when you get inside and find transphobia, ethnic caricature, off-the-cuff rape culture that’s too believable to reject as “a lesson,” youthful women crying when they’re told to go and do their sex work, and women called bitches as a matter of course, one has to wonder, is it a neutral matter that this is being sold as an entry into the collective spank bank?
Do you want those guys at your comic shop stroking their organs to racial and sexist reduction?
Here’s another question: isn’t depilation a risky prospect for a zombie? Whoops, waxed off my entire labial structure!
Zombie Tramp has sold +fifty percent more than Action Lab’s average print run (I’m assured that the press release titled “Zombie Tramp Boasts Big Numbers” was no kind of entendre — presumably neither is Comic Batards’ “genre bending“), so apparently this… is still the present. This is still feeding the future.
Hoo fuckin’ ray. FO SHO!
