John Sears | April 14, 2011
Oh yes, this sounds like one of the films playing at the megaplex in my own personal hell: Max Adler, who plays the bully Dave Karofsky on the hit Fox show Glee, already has plans for the upcoming hiatus, and it’s to play a role in a teen comedy movie about zombies. … “Comedy and [...]
John Sears | April 13, 2011
..is in cheap and exploitative fiction. Case in point from yesterday: Is there a zombie on your lawn? Are you out of happy plants to fight them? No worries, mere citizen! Champions Online’s cadre of super-wonders is rushing to protect your home and brains from unwanted undead intrusion! Cryptic announced that it is bringing back [...]
John Sears | April 10, 2011
A response to this post at The Zombie Feed. What is it that makes an author write a story attacking the Differently Animated? Sure, there’s the monetary angle, the fact that Anti-Zombie fiction is hot now and therefore it’s easier to get published, and the nasty anti-social tendencies of writers in general. (I know from [...]
John Sears | April 6, 2011
I really need to start a list of all the genres that haven’t been crossed with the Zombie Apocalypse meme yet and check them off as new projects are announced. It’d be like playing Bingo, only even more grim and depressing: A zombie apocalypse unites a ragtag pack of dogs in the ruined streets of [...]
John Sears | April 5, 2011
I don’t suppose you can expect a *ton* of originality from yet another ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ game: Dead Island lies somewhere in the middle of the zombie market’s two big darlings: Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising. Like Valve’s masterpiece it’s a first-person adventure with four player coop features. But instead of making Dead Island a [...]
John Sears | March 24, 2011
If you read comics, you probably know about IDW. Ok, you might. They’re mostly known for doing licensed spin-offs of various franchises, and employing Ben Templesmith to make blurry, murky, ridiculously hard-to-follow artwork bashing Vampires. You know, the ten thousand varieties of ’30 Days of Night’. That sort of thing. We however have long been [...]
John Sears | March 23, 2011
There are days when our ‘Zombie Flavored Creativity Substitute’ tag feels like it’s going to get worn out, which shouldn’t be possible, but hey, everything has a limit: What flies south in the winter and quacks “cruummbbbssss”? Zombie Ducks! Yes, someone has shamelessly, err, *borrowed* the NES classic game ‘Duck Hunt’ and reconfigured it to [...]
John Sears | March 22, 2011
When in doubt, exploit the Differently Animated. That seems to be the lesson videogame developers around the world have learned in the wake of best-selling titles like Resident Evil, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty: Black Ops and so forth. Whether it’s Zombies in a cutesy tower defense game ala Plants vs Zombies, [...]
John Sears | March 20, 2011
Google pointed me toward this Opinion piece in the Ottawa Citizen by one Roger Collier today, which purports to reexamine the negative attitudes so many hold toward Zombies. Only of course, it does no such thing. The first clue was in the title: ‘Zombies were people, too.’ (The capitalization is in the original, and I [...]
John Sears | March 17, 2011
First of course, Mr. Grahame-Smith got the ball rolling on the entire genre of ‘Mix public domain work with Zombies’, for which literature itself owes him a sound thrashing. Yes, we can lay the lion’s share of the blame for an entire subgenre of lazy, relatively unimaginative Anti-Zombie fiction at his feet, even if, of [...]