Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups.
An early sign of the millennial zombie glut can be seen in the world of comics. After FantaCo’s efforts fizzled out in the mid-90s, other publishers seem to have been uninterested in putting out Night of the Living Dead comics. Then, in the 2003-5 period, no fewer than five companies launched series derived, in one way or another, from Romero’s zombie saga.
The most significant was Image Comics, publisher of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead. This started out as a pitch for a Night of the Living Dead comic that took advantage of the film’s public domain status to continue Romero’s story of a 1960s zombie apocalypse. Early artwork from the pitch stage exists showing a character clearly based on Charles Craig’s newsreader in Night of the Living Dead, along with appropriately un-decomposed zombie designs harking back to the pre-Savini era. Image publisher Jim Valentino suggested that the team sever ties to Romero’s film so that the comic could stand as a creator-owned work. The result debuted in late 2003 and is one of the greatest commercial success stories in twenty-first-century American comics; its TV adaptation (which came in 2010) continued the spread of the zombie plague.
Meanwhile, as this series shall be covering in due course, Romero himself teamed up with powerhouse DC Comics to produce his zombie series Toe Tags, which launched in 2004. Then came 2005, bringing with it Escape of the Living Dead, the beginning of a collaboration between Avatar Press and Romero’s co-writer John Russo. The same year also saw a comic adaptation of Romero’s new film Land of the Dead, courtesy of IDW.
Before we get to any of those, however, we have the junior member of the quintet, which appeared fairly early in the wave. In late 2004, a small publisher called Dead Dog Comics put out Night of the Living Dead: Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles, a series consisting of three full issues plus an additional convention-exclusive sample issue. Written by Joel Moen and Mark Kidwell, with Kidwell pencilling, the project had a similar starting-point to the original Walking Dead pitch in that the creators took the copyright-free first instalment of Romero’s film series and came up with their own continuation. As the title suggests, the film’s heroine Barbara takes centre stage.
The comic uses monochrome flashbacks to detail Barbara’s backstory. We are shown a recap of Night of the Living Dead leading up to her presumed death at the hands of her zombified brother and other ghouls. We then see how she succeeded in fighting off the attackers, escaping the house, and falling into the protection of Sheriff McClellan (referred to as “Mclellan” in the comic).
The main story picks up more than a decade later. The zombie apocalypse has lasted into the early 1980s, although it has not halted the march of fashion, as evidenced by Barbara’s era-appropriate Tina Turner hairstyle. Mclellan now presides over a walled community of survivors, where children play in safety while Barbara and the other adults head out to fetch supplies and gun down zombies.
The comic’s Barbara bears little resemblance to Judith O’Dea, who played the character in the original film. Aside from the flamboyant hair, she is closer to Patricia Tallman’s tank-topped, gun-toting interpretation from the 1990 remake. Her true roots, however, are in the “Bad Girl” trend of 1990s comics.
The 90s brought with them a wave of post-Ripley sci-fi and fantasy heroines: notable screen examples include Terminator 2’s Sarah Connor, Buffy, Xena, Lara Croft, and Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway. The decade’s comics, meanwhile, had been exploring down-and-dirty violence far from the auspices of the Comics Code Authority. The Bad Girl was the inevitable entwining of the two threads, being a hypersexualised antiheroine who would battle genre-relevant monsters armed with big guns, big breasts, and very little in the way of waistline or clothing.
The Bad Girl trend was spearheaded by Chaos! Comics’ Lady Death and Top Cow’s Witchblade, both introduced in the 90s with innumerable also-rans surrounding them (see Kate Koresh and Lisa Lockheed in FantaCo’s Night of the Living Dead titles). Comics of this type were popular enough to survive the decade, despite the catastrophic crash faced by the American comics industry during the 90s. The 2005 launch of Zenescope Entertainment, a company whose bread-and-butter is Bad Girl reimaginings of heroines from fairy tales and other public domain fantasy stories, is a testimony to this.
Having reimagined Barbara as a post-90s Bad Girl, Zombie Chronicles gives her an appropriately pulpish adventure. On one of her excursions to the outside world, she runs into a survivor named Peter Cooke (not, presumably, after the comedy partner of Dudley Moore). A scientist, Cooke reveals that his research unit has been trying to eliminate the zombies by heightening their intelligence and aggression, thereby turning them against one another.
Inevitably, the experiment backfired: the strain of new, smarter zombie has already wiped out Cooke’s colleagues and now breaches Mclellan’s compound, killing almost all inside. One of the few survivors is a little girl, but she has already been contaminated. Barbara’s only hope to save the child is to follow Cooke on a trip to his research unit, where a possible antidote awaits.
Once the action reaches Cooke’s laboratory, the comic deploys a twist inspired by a certain plot point from the original film – an element that the derivative works typically skim over as a tiny bit dated and, well, comic book-ish. This is the notion that the zombie plague began with radiation from a crashed Venus probe.
In Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles, we learn that the news broadcasts told only half of the story. The zombie plague started not with the space probe, but with an alien spacecraft that had been following it and which likewise crashed on Earth. Housed in the lab is patient zero of the zombifying viral strain: an extraterrestrial humanoid that Cooke has dubbed the Fourth Horseman. Here, we see the comic riffing on the 1990s vogue for ufology, as manifested by The X-Files and Independence Day. The Fourth Horseman is even drawn to resemble a more wizened version of the creature seen in 1995’s notorious hoax film, Alien Autopsy.
And here we have the comic’s high concept: zombie aliens. Where FantaCo’s titles, at their best, used Romero and Russo’s premise as a starting point for outrageous cartoon satire, Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles hinges on the same basic monster-mash appeal as Universal’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man from 1943.
As for Barbara, she remains more of a pin-up than a fleshed-out character. Her few intriguing personality traits are used as plotting prompts rather than subjects for exploration. In one scene she sees a child being bullied by a mob of other kids, which triggers her trauma of being attacked by zombies; but this is merely the lead-in to an expository flashback scene. Similarly, her maternal relationship with the little girl she rescues, while derivative of Ripley’s relationship with Newt in Aliens, offers plenty of potential for characterisation; this potential is squandered, however, with the girl serving as little more than a means of pushing the characters to the laboratory.
Had Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles been a film, it would likely have been as flat as Return of the Living Dead 3 – as a best-case scenario. Crucially, though, we are this time looking not at a film, but a comic. Where Return 3 takes 97 minutes to get through, the whole of Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles can be read in a modest coffee break. Even the atrocious Children of the Living Dead might, conceivably, have made a serviceable diversion in this context. In short, a comic can get away with a higher level of trashiness than a film can.
Not that this conclusion will be music to the ears of anyone who values comics as an art form, of course. The August 1992 issue of The Comics Journal ran a feature in which a decidedly unimpressed Alan Moore read a few titles from the newly-launched Image Comics – Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn and Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon – and concluded with a memorable comparison to drugs:
To make a chemical analogy, a classic superhero book like Plastic Man or Captain Marvel might be viewed as something like the coca leaf: not terribly exciting as drugs go, and yet intensely stimulating and above all harmless thanks to certain alkalis that balance out the drug’s more negative effects. In comic terms, these alkalis are plot, imagination, character and things like that.
Continuing this deeply tongue-in-cheek analogy, Moore argued that the superhero comics of the 1970s and 80s, “geared to constant breathless action with the storyline now merely something that’s designed to get you from one fight scene to the next,” were comparable to cocaine: the leaf has been refined and the alkalis removed. The likes of Youngblood, meanwhile, represent a further stage of refinement: the crack cocaine of comics. “The audience, no doubt, will make its mind up and will just say No or Yo to drugs as it sees fit.”
Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles, despite coming from more than a decade after the early Image comics chemically decomposed by Alan Moore, is based on the same ethos. Even Mark Kidwell’s drawing style owes a lot to the Liefeld-McFarlane-Larsen triumvirate, placing a similar emphasis on muscles, breasts, scowls and violence (and, recalling Larsen specifically, oddly cute characters with large, doll-like heads).
If nothing else, Zombie Chronicles is utterly committed to its status as crack cocaine, eking whatever trashy stimulation it can from every last inch of Romero’s scenario. Take, for example, the climactic scene in which Cooke tries to rape Barbara. This is the comic at its most unashamedly exploitative, as the sequence exists primarily as an excuse to have Barbara spend a chunk of the climax topless (albeit with the panel compositions taking absurd lengths to hide her nipples, like the nude scenes in Austin Powers). Yet it also stems quite naturally from the apocalyptic setting: Cooke views Barbara as an Eve to his Adam, necessary to repopulate the world.
The series ends with Barbara reaching the White House, where a president and some sort of government are rumoured to have survived; she discovers that the self-appointed commander-in-chief is none other than Charles Manson. This is an inspired mixing of two late-1960s visions of the apocalypse: Romero’s zombies and Manson’s visions of “Helter Skelter.” It could easily have served as the starting point for a whole comic. Instead, it is used as a twist ending, becoming more of an image than an idea – as, indeed, did the zombie aliens, or even Barbara’s personal struggle with trauma.
Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles is exactly the sort of comic where any intriguing ideas are soon calcified into eye-catching images, which in turn become backdrops to the action. This is an essential trait of comics in the crack cocaine mode. While the creators of titles such as The Walking Dead were following the lead of Alan Moore and others in his generation by creating comics that strove to be, if not necessarily literary, then at least comparable to the more respectable areas of TV dramas, the likes of Dead Dog Comics were celebrating all things flashy and trashy.
Dead Dog, incidentally, was a short-lived outfit, launching in 1999 and folding in 2006. Reading Barbara’s Zombie Chronicles is somewhat poignant, with the first issue promoting upcoming comics based on Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Howling, neither of which saw the light of day.
The company did, however, launch a 2006 comic entitled Day of the Dead: The Rising of Bub, written by Mark Kidwell, drawn by Jeff Zornow and starring the good-guy zombie from Romero’s third Living Dead film. Only the first instalment of the projected three-issue series saw the light of day, and it remains one of the most obscure Romero tie-ins to receive an official license. As for Kidwell, he would later become the writer of Image Comics’ ‘68, which ran from 2011 to 2016 and deployed zombies to the Vietnam War.
Next: Romero goes to comicsville…
