BuyZombie informs us of a disturbing new media project to indoctrinate young children with common Anti-Zombie stereotypes (along with, presumably, their parents):

The Book

They sleep during the day. They awaken at night. They are among us, and yet not quite fully human. It’s a … ZOMBIE! No, wait, .. it’s a BABY! … Huh?

A Baby’s First Book of Zombies is a title for young children and their parents which playfully explores the parallels between babies and zombies and the process by which parents slowly become zombies during their first year of parenthood. By alternating between scenes which are very silly and scenes that are just a little bit creepy, young children can begin to learn the joys of incorporating monsters into their imaginary worlds.

We’ve seen other unscrupulous individuals try to take advantage of forming young minds and spread hatred of Zombies before; many times, in fact. However this project, aimed squarely at the not-yet-fully-verbal, is a serious contender for the most pernicious and predatory.

Zombies, not quite fully human? That’s offensive! Very offensive.

BuyZombie has several example pages from the book as well, illustrating Zombies moaning, screaming, shambling about, all in an ugly and stereotypical manner. Apparently a lot of work went into finely tailoring the fearmongering and divisiveness of the book to the target audience’s young minds, moreover:

Learning from Zombies

Despite their rotting flesh, our zombies are actually quite thoughtful about how pre-literate readers develop reading skills. The repetition in the text allows young children to learn prediction skills and read aloud along with caregivers (see Eric Carle’s Brown Bear book for the archetype). The illustrations are designed to create parallels between the baby and zombie worlds–look again carefully at the video and you will be able to play a kind of “Where’s Waldo” type game of matching items across the pages. And introducing Zombies and monsters into the imaginary worlds of children is inspired by E.B. White, who believed that young people, no less than adults, enjoy experiencing the full range of human emotions.

The Future

We have big plans for our babies and zombies; the Learning from Zombies project has a lot more in store. With your support, we hope that this successful campaign is the first step in bringing baby zombie learning to the world in all sorts of media.

Unless the zombie apocalypse does set in, and then at least your children will be prepared…

Prepared to hate, no doubt.

What’s most tragic and unsettling about this project for us is that, if you watch the Kickstarter video in full, you can see some positive and Zombie Friendly elements in the draft version of the book as well. They’re easily outweighed by the insulting and literal infantilization of the Differently Animated community, but they’re still present. Zombies love their families! Yes!

Why couldn’t it be more like that, and less about cheap shots at Zombie mobility or supposed lack of Zombie hygiene?

You can learn more about this odious book-in-the-making here, or by watching the kickstarter video below.

Tags: Books

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 5:43 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.