Adorable Zombie urchin? That’s our gimmick… err…. angle?

Blast.

At any rate, there’s another new zombie comic to consider, the aforementioned ‘The Littlest Zombie’, being published by Antarctic Press, created by artist/author Fred Perry. This comic is told from the perspective of a young and perpetually hungry zombie child making his way in the Post-Apocalypse. Civilization has fallen, zombies roam the land eating survivors, it’s got a Walking Dead meets Day of the Dead feel going on. Mad Max style raiders and slavers in the wasteland, dodging each other and the ever-hungry zombie population.

The comic is a bit confusing, for us here at the ZRC, both as readers and activists. In the introductory material the author states that he thinks of Zombies as having roughly cat-level intelligence, and seeing the living humans as their food, to play with and devour, like small birds or rodents. As lifeist as that conception of the Differently Animated is, it would seem to conflict with our youthful zombie narrator, who speaks quite eloquently about his struggles to find food and general loneliness, even as he remorselessly devours the Survivor population. Cats don’t have thoughtful inner dialogues or understand human speech and behavior, at least, not the last time I checked.

If the zombies in this comic are so intelligent, why do they act so… mindless? I mean, the Littlest Zombie is able to observe the obvious limitations of their strategies for capturing and eating people. He can learn new behaviors, understand the language of the Survivors, form plans, anticipate the future and decipher the history of the past. He knows the survivors are intelligent entities. Yet he ruthlessly, even cheerful dismembers and devours them.

The other zombies in this comic book world show no signs of intelligence at all, at least in the first issue. They seem to be your typical Romero movie zombies, relentless and mindless at the same time, fixated only on eating tasty human flesh. Is the ‘Littlest Zombie’ some sort of outlier? Has he retained an extra measure of intellect, but is for some reason incapable of empathy, of understanding why it’s wrong to, say, rip someone’s head off and devour their brains against their will?

So this first issue has been both outrageous and confusing. It’s as if the author wants to say, ‘Sure, zombies aren’t like the movies – they’re actually worse, because they’re smart enough to know what they’re doing is wrong, but compulsive and selfish enough to do it anyway, thoughtlessly.’ Thus attempting to create a new, possibly even more hateful stereotype while abandoning some of the old ones.

We here at the ZRC don’t condone that sort of behavior. We feel that you can fight anti-Zombie prejudice with honesty and respect for both the Living and the Differently Animated, and this gory, blackly humorous comic serves at best to perpetuate the core of the worst Zombie myth of all: that you cannot peacefully coexist with the Undead, no matter how cute they are.

The ZRC begs to differ.

Tags: Comics, Review

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 7:07 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.