Sorry for the scant news on the Lurch auction lately; let’s get up to speed quickly, shall we?

The Zombie Rights Campaign solicited donations for a silent auction/fundraiser with proceeds to benefit the Lynn Sage Cancer Research Foundation, to be held at Famous Monsters of Filmland’s Convention in Indianapolis. We got a great response and a number of fantastic donations from horror luminaries like Lloyd Kaufman, Fred Van Lente and David Wellington, as well as a number of nifty items from Z-Rights fans or Allies like Michelle Hartz and the good folks at Atomic Age Cinema.

At the actual convention itself, we gathered signatures for a special, one of a kind (literally – we only printed one copy) poster sized version of our ‘Zombies Forever’ print (desktop wallpapers available here). Over a dozen big names from the Zombie movie world put their pen to glossy paper for a good cause, even though on any other day we might well have been picketing them, which I say shows good sportsmanship if nothing else. We then put the poster up in the auction.

Being perfectly frank, however, after the first day for whatever reason, convention attendance fell off somewhat, and the auction didn’t do quite as well as we had hoped. A few items were left, and we ran a followup ebay auction, which sold off most of the remaining fine donations. On the other hand, we continued to have items come in even through the days of the convention itself, with fellow vendors Synapse Films donating three movies to the cause, which was outstanding.

I was about to wrap it up and mail off the check when we got yet ANOTHER amazing donation to the cause last week, which gave the ZRC pause – should we extend the auction or fire off a check and save the remaining items for a future event?

First, that last item to come in. When I first fired off a quick email to Shaenon Garrity, artist behind popular webcomic Skin-Horse and the classic Narbonic series, amongst others, she responded saying she’d be happy to donate a quick sketch to the auction. However due to a miscommunication on my part the deadline for the auction was missed, and I received her artwork in the mail last week. I was expecting, as I said, a quick sketch, something quite nice but not an item for her to pour her heart and soul into.

Instead we got this amazing, positive depiction of Zombies:

(The title, which I partially cut off because I’m not great with the scanner, plus the image is delightfully large: “Zombies and Beignets, Morning”)

Utterly incredible! An extremely gratifying scene of Zombie-Living coexistence emphasizing the proud history and diversity of the American Zombie, particularly highlighting their New Orleans heritage and helping reaffirm their bond with the larger human community over the shared experience of breaking bread. Truly a heart-warming scene and a constant inspirational goal for the staff here at the Zombie Rights Campaign.

Getting this in the ZRC mailbox sincerely made my day, and the ZRC’s week, in fact. You can see why receiving this astoundingly brilliant and totally uplifting original Zombie art could give a person pause; how do you best make use of something like this? It really deserves to be framed and shown in person, not put up for some impersonal net auction, I think.

So for now, with the kind permission of Ms. Garrity, the original work you see above, “Zombies & Beignets, Morning”, will stay in the ZRC archives until our next charity fundraising event. We’ll find a good way to part with it, painful as that prospect may be.

And so, with the sale of Lurch shirts, prints, the auction, the ebay auction and some in-person sales to kind friends of Zombiekind, we can bring the first and prototypical Lurch auction to a close. The grand total is a not-too-shabby $302.20 donation to the Lynn Sage Cancer Research Foundation, on behalf of Zombies, their Allies and Living people everywhere.

Naturally I wish it could be more, but that’s always going to be the case, isn’t it? We here at the ZRC are very grateful to all our kind donatees and, yes, even the Zombie movie people who graciously signed our poster at the convention. We wish to extend our sincerest thanks, in no particular order, to:

Fred Van Lente
David Wellington
Lloyd Kaufman
Todd and Kerry Breitenstein
Wayne West
Michelle Hartz
Baron Mardi and the entire Atomic Age Cinema Cast
Judith O’Dea
George Konana
John Russo
Charles Craig
Gary Streiner
Herbert Summer
Kyra Schon
Bill Hinzman
Allan Trautman
Beverly Randolph
Tom Savini
Terry Alexander
Michael Gornick
Mark Tierno
Leonard A. Lies
Shaenon Garrity
Synapse Films
Famous Monsters of Filmland
The staff of the Wyndham West hotel in Indianapolis
All the patrons and purchasers of fine Zombie Rights wares

Thank you all for helping out a truly worthy cause, in addition to promoting equality for the Differently Animated.

–From the staff of The Zombie Rights Campaign

Tags: Charity Auction, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 12:53 am and is filed under Lurch for the Cure, ZRC News. 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.