Newspaper Comics Defame Zombie Snowmen
Alert cultural historian and ZRC Stringer Andrew Leal pointed the ZRC toward a couple of recent newspaper comics that featured Zombie snowmen… in a very negative light.
Now, I know what many of you are thinking: “Newspapers still have comics?”
Astonishingly enough, they do! What’s more, they almost all pick the comics to grace their pages from a small group of syndicated offerings, so most papers carry mostly the same ones.
About now you might be checking to see if your city or town still has a functional newspaper; many, in fact, still do. Dead trees are regularly pulped for a one-time-use news publication that is out of date before its first reader picks it up and gets newsprint on their fingers.
It’s true.
What’s even more surprising is that the Zombie (and often Anti-Zombie) craze sweeping America for the last couple of years has actually penetrated this Lost World of sequential art, and combined with the season, has led to..
Zombie Snowmen.
Tragically, the comics are pretty unenlightened on the subject.
First up we have a strip from “Baby Blues” running today, January 8th:
I felt a bit ambiguous about this comic strip. At first glance it might be critiquing the Anti-Zombie media, right? Well.. I don’t think that’s the message. Rather, I think that here we’re seeing a ‘classic’ parental reaction to their children casually enjoying grotesquely violent media. Unfortunately in order to make the joke, this comic chooses to push the harmful Anti-Zombie brain-eating stereotype, and onto a Zombie SNOWman no less.
Next up, a few days ago on January 5th, Wizard of Id ran this comic:
For those unfamiliar with it, ‘Wizard of Id’ is ostensibly set in a medieval kingdom run by a brutal despot and his right-hand wizard, where all is suffering and woe forever, justice is non-existent, torture and torment common and crushing poverty and despair the norm.
Yes, that is the setting for a ‘humorous’ comic strip, I understand your confusion.
Still, even by its standards, this comic is appalling. Just examine the image a bit closer:
-It’s a bitterly cold day with ample snow and yet no one, not even the mighty wizard, can afford to wear shoes.
-The impoverished children, no doubt attempting to distract themselves from their plight, build a snowman outside the castle walls.
-Somehow these children have been informed of Frosty the Snowman, a cultural product from a less-starvation-filled age, which won’t exist for centuries, and emulate it.
-Upon seeing this temporary break in their collective misery, the Wizard insinuates himself and, on the pretense of replacing Frosty’s missing magic hat, uses one of his own devising to create a Zombie Snowman, which is then depicted in the stereotyped and unfair manner common to Anti-Zombie media.
What we see here is really a double tragedy: the children are traumatized, of course, but what about the Zombie Snowman? Thanks to foul sorcery he is now fulled with an insatiable hunger, but he’s still a Snowman. Presumably he cannot move, let alone hunt or eat; no wonder the Wizard looks upon the final scene so calmly. He has inflicted suffering across the land, as his dark master (the King or Satan, take your pick) commands, and is in no danger himself. All in all, a solid afternoon’s work.
For evil.
So the legacy media is now spreading a new variant on the Anti-Zombie stereotype, bashing innocent Zombie Snowmen.
Snowmen like ours. Remember this jolly fellow?
Snowmen like these, and of course Zombies in general, are harmed by these negative portrayals. So, for those of you out there who might, by chance, patronize these ancient media platforms known as ‘newspapers’, ask yourselves: ‘Do I really want to give money to institutions which blatantly stereotype harmless and innocent Zombie Snowpeople?’
Do you? If you’re reading this blog, I doubt it.
Something to keep in mind for the future.
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