Seriously, people. Enough.

I get it, I really do. You watch TV, go to the movies, browse Barnes and Noble and you think, ‘Zombies are EVERYWHERE these days! I should cash in!”

Please don’t. Don’t just toss Zombies, particularly Zombie stereotypes, into your work, thinking that you can cover intellectual and creative bankruptcy with a trendy reference to the zeitgeist.

You might think it’s ‘cool’ or that it will appeal to ‘the kids’. It isn’t, and it won’t, unless said kids have been huffing too much glue.

You might even believe it makes you look like you’re a cutting edge thinker and your hastily Zombified book/play/comic/movie/snack food will vault you into stardom and respectability.

It won’t do either of those things. You know what your ‘work’ will look like to everyone else?

It’ll look something like this:

In an all-new harder edged series and new format featuring legendary writer Gerry Conway! Frank and Joe go undercover as the Living Dead to infiltrate a “Zombie Crawl” that has acquired a notorious reputation for potentially deadly accidents. Will the Undercover Brothers and Agents of A.T.A.C. become the next victims? As if this weren’t enough – there’s something dark and sinister happening while everyone’s distracted by zombie madness! Could this be linked to the eerie events also occurring in River Heights, home of Nancy Drew?

Yes folks, it’s all-new, ‘harder edged’ Hardy Boys with Zombies. Well, maybe; Zombie Walkers, anyway. The Hardy Boys, going undercover in greenface.

Apparently it might be linked to new ‘eerie’ events with Nancy Drew, which involve vampires, I guess.

Uggh.

Feel that? That sickening nausea, that taste of bile at the back of your throat? Yeah. That’s what everyone else will get looking at your new, hastily slapped together ‘Zombie’ book.

Bonus condemnation to the knuckleheads at Papercutz for pioneering what may be the single stupidest form of advertising yet devised by man: Youtube commercials for BOOKS.

Here’s the one for the Hardy Boys ‘Crawling with Zombies’ graphic ‘novel’*:

and here’s Nancy Drew slumming it with a not-quite-sparkly vampire**, or something:

There, do you see? That’s why not to put Zombies in absolutely everything just because The Walking Dead broke ratings records for AMC:

You’ll look like a tool.

This has been a public service announcement from your friends at The Zombie Rights Campaign.

*at 64 pages, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a novel of any sort
**This is not clever at all, and whoever thought it was needs professional help, editorial, psychiatric, I don’t care which:

Vampire-mania has gripped River Heights, with teenage girls going wild over the new “DieLite” novels and movies. But what happens when a supposedly “real” handsome young vampire arrives on the scene? Will Nancy expose him as a fraud — or fall under his dark spell? As if that wasn’t enough– there’s something dark and sinister happening while everyone’s distracted by the vampire madness. Could this possibly be linked to what’s happening in Bayport, home of the Hardy Boys? Spoiler warning: there are no vampires, blood or gore in this graphic novel.

DieLite? Seriously? If satire isn’t dead, contra Tom Lehrer, it’s at the very least in a deep, deep coma, shamed into avoiding reality by the atrocities done in its name.

Tags: Books, Comics, Zombie Flavored Creative Substitute

This entry was posted by John Sears on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.