Zombie Cliche Lookout: Fighting Words
Talking trash is a long, hallowed tradition in action movies and sports, especially if you count things like one-liners. This sort of dialog serves a few different purposes: it psyches up the protagonist and gets him/her ready for the fight, it puts the bad guy on notice that things are about to get messy, and – perhaps most important of all – it gives the audience a clear signal for either the start or the end of the action, depending on where the one-liner was delivered.
This can extend into other genres as well, horror especially. Protagonists in horror stories are fighting against something, so why shouldn’t they have the same opportunity to pump themselves up prior to showdown with the ultimate evil? And even if that evil consists of zombies who aren’t really going to get a lot out of your well-honed insults, a little trash talk never hurt anyone.
About this Episode:
I had some fun writing this one, putting a few different versions of the dialog in Clark’s mouth. I wanted him to sound mad, but not terribly clever or well spoken, so it couldn’t be too cool. I think this landed about where I wanted it, as a person lashing out without a lot of pomp and circumstance.
I also like the expression on the zombies face in the last frame; it almost looks like he’s concerned that he’s about to get stabbed in the face… almost.
Discussion Question: Living or Dead
This one popped up in the comments on the last episode, so I knew I had to steal it. How do you prefer your zombies: as undead monsters, or living people infected with some sort of disease that makes them nuts?
There’s certainly arguments to be made either way. The living people zombies might be faster, but they would also need to eat and drink and rest, unlike their undead counterparts.
Clark’s lucky that the zombie’s only concern is getting to its tasty food so tantalizingly close so it can eat it. Of course, that is a big concern, as zombies don’t respond to threats of violence or whatever some character is going to lash out at them with, they just shamble ever forward until they get to what they’re after! 😀
Both a blessing and a curse when it comes to zombies.
you know, that knife looks like on the one on The Hunger Games
It’s a fairly common design, sort of a sawback survival knife. I think it looks cool, although I don’t think it’d be terribly practical.
im not sure howanyone can throw a knife like that.
I don’t think it would work terribly well as a throwing knife.
Throwing knives doesn’t work in real life. See, the thrown knife spins end over end. The thrower has to know the distance to the target to throw it effectively. OK, so what happens when the target is moving?
Another thing with throwing knives is that, if you don’t take out the bad guy in one hit, you’ve now just lost your weapon/tool.
Sure looks cool on TV though.
Yeah, that’s why I prefer buckshot.
At least the saw part is on the back of the blade. People seem to love all those “tactical” knifes with the serrated bit, and it bugs me. You often have a hard time sharpening those things, they can’t make a clean cut, you can’t put your thumb or finger on the blade to aid in a precise cut… in short they are perfect to appeal to the average person who knows nothing of knives or sharpening them and just wants something that looks cool when they go on a camping trip.
The thing about serrations is that, when they’re useful, they’re really damn useful. The trouble is, they’re just not useful most of the time and end up getting in the way.
My pocket knife is partially serrated and I loved it when I first got it oh so many years ago. I’ve been wanting to replace it for ages now.
I much prefer the classic zombie. Grey, slow moving menace, never resting SOB. If the zombies were disease infected human livings, that would imply that they could use weapons as means of defence, and plan ways of attack. That would mean that they need rest, food, water, and shelter, like Dave stated before. Thank you first grade science for teaching us the basic essentials of life.
I’d like to also say that living, infected people are less morally okay to kill wantonly. A walking corpse is an abomination of nature and needs to be eliminated, so there shouldn’t be any remorse or hesitation to do so. A living person infected with a virus is just a sick person who needs treatment; while killing them may be a matter of your personal survival, it doesn’t give you the right to just slay all of the infected that you see. Undead zombies, though, are free game.
How about living infected people for which there is no cure other than death? It’s like the undead zombies only your choices are a lot worse because you still know you’re not going to be able to do anything good about them yet you know you must.
This is an interesting discussion (that I’m totally going to milk a discussion question out of).
How can you prove that there is no cure? With a complete breakdown of society, odds are no cures are going to be forthcoming, but how can you say with any certainty?
Maybe if I get a medical degree in zombification one day, I’ll answer you! Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of thing you can get off the back of a cereal packet! 😀
It’s only a matter of time before some money-strapped university starts offering courses on it.
Academically, you can be pretty sure there’s no cure if the virus causes the zombie’s aggression through brain damage. However, as a practical matter, there’s no way in hell that your average survivor is going to be able to tell whether it’s that or some sort of severe hormonal thing that could potentially be reversed. Those are the two main possibilities, as far as I can see them. Of course, I’m an engineer, not a neurologist, so I could be wrong.
I too vastly prefer the old school, gray mottled walking corpses. They’re better in almost every way to me. I like the slowness. Sure, it’s not as immediately threatening, but it adds another element of creepiness and otherworldliness to the zombie equation.
Sure, undead zombies are just plain ickier. We’ve grown up with the semblance of modern education. Most of us have a basic understanding of germ theory and read of historical plagues. It makes the plague zombie more familiar, more relatable.
At the same time, raise your hand if you’ve seen undead?
*crickets chirping*
The undead can have bones showing like a damned krokodil addict, limbs gone, and maggots crawling out eye sockets. They just… keep… coming. They don’t breathe (imagine looking at a person and not seeing the chest moving), talk, eat, sleep, or interact with their environment. Their only task is to destroy the living.
That’s much scarier than the new school “zombies”. Again, it’s a crutch of a weak writer. The more powerful the character, the more powerful the monster. In the first Alien movie, there was one monster for an unarmed crew. In Aliens we have a couple of squads of kitted-out space marines. Better have tens of thousands of rapidly-reproducing xenomorphs.
Weak.
Re: Aliens, are you saying that adding more aliens made the film weak?
My reply didn’t stick, for some reason…
I think Aliens is a great movie. I think that it’s a weak plot device to make the bad guy(s) orders of magnitude the second time around, because the good guys are more powerful. In the first movie there was one alien and an unarmed crew. The second time around there were two squads of heavily armed space marines, so there have to be tens of thousands of xenomorphs. If it would have been the marines versus the first alien they would have smoked it, left a big mess, cracked open some cold ones, and started the weekend in style.
In real life, the odds aren’t always so even.
Ah, make sense to me.
That’s just an old dramatic trick. The opponents have to be at least somewhat evenly matched, otherwise there’s not a lot of story.
Luckily, the space marines has Hudson to keep things real.
So, if you were telling the story of one unarmed man in your zombie world, he would only go up against one zombie?
Didn’t think so.
LOL
Well I wouldn’t consider one dude versus on zombie evenly matched. A person can think, strategize, use weapons. One unarmed man against, say, a dozen would make things much more interesting.
That’s the other side of the rule: they have to be reasonably matched, but the “good guys” can never have the advantage.
To keep it entirely within the Romero mythos, it’s the difference between The Night of the Living Dead and the The Crazies (neither remakes). In both cases, they were going to kill you; and in both cases eliminating them first was pure self-defense.
I think plague zombies scare me a little more. How does the disease spread? Is it easy to catch? What if it’s in the air, like Serenity, and it makes the afflicted want to rape you to death, eat your flesh, and sew your skin into their clothes? (And if you’re very lucky, they’ll do it in that order) Even if the zombies are just “normal” people, it still may make them very difficult to kill, simply because a highly motivated person is not easy to kill.
The scariest thing about undead zombies is the never-ending supply of them. Every dead person becomes a zombie. Grandma just died in her sleep? Better drive a 16 penny nail into her head, before she turns…
I love how you find comfort into giving grandma the best of luck.
A dignified death is part of living. Take care of them in life. Take care of them in death. That’s a professional courtesy.
Bo: Post-Apocalyptic Hospice Nurse
Maybe.
Maybe I just don’t want grandma gnawing on my leg.
But yeah, it was a nursing reference.
Yeah, grandma gnawing on your leg isn’t going to do any favors. Death with dignity means no zombification (doesn’t that sound like a motivational poster?).
NURSE ALERT!
I can take ’em apart; and I can put ’em back together. 😉
can you bring my great grandma back to life?
Only as a zombie.
Do you have a Necronomicon handy?
Well said, Bo. I still need to see the original Crazies (I’ve heard it’s a bit of a mess, but still).
Living zombies are probably deadlier, and harder to escape, but for some reason that doesn’t make them scarier to me.
Reavers are pretty damn frightening though.
Sure it’s a mess, but worth a big bowl of popcorn and a Netflix, I’d say.
Fair enough. I’ll have to add it to my list.
Hey Dave, i’ve been having some technical difficulties with my webcomic, but i finnaly got the first comic stip in, unfourtuanatley, i had to delete a few strips but its running fine now, here’s a link, http://hungergames.thecomicseries.com/
Looking good. Are they all going to be a large, single-panel, or is that just for the opening?
well theres all going to be one panel, but like i said on the last page “im going to post 9 comics a week” or at least 2 every other day so that people get the point.
Right on.
still, the next ones kind of a Disney version of the hunger games, (without the whole kissing thing.) just plain stupid though.
What’s stupid, kissing?
in a webcomic, yes
Fair enough. I haven’t had any in BotD… yet.
there might be some tecnical difficulties, so im going to tell you, everyone in the circle just runs of with no one dying.
i mean they all run away
could you add it to the brick comic network too? that would be great.
Add what?
Oh, I missed your other link.
No, I can’t add anything to the BCN dropdown. You need to participate there and release something like 40 strips before they consider you to be added. It takes some time, but it’s well worth it.
i can accept to those terms, and im really sorry about the whole “non-lego” enviorment thing, the truth is, i dont have a lot of outside lego peices, i try to keep all of the outside buildings out of the picture.
But still, that was one rocking Cornicopia
A lot of comicers use non-LEGO environments. It’s just a different aesthetic.
i saw one webcomic that was made outside, and around his house
Was it a Bionicle one?
it was call “Apocoliptic adventure” or something like that. and by the way, there might be a delay on the next comic, the laptop that i use to post my comics is acting up. so hopefully by tomorrow.
Oh yeah, I remember that one. Never got a chance to read much of it though.
i kinda gave up on it as well
Nice one Dave…..it does look like the zombie has suddenly thought “wait a minute, this dude’s got a knife!”
Intentional or not, I like it!
Hah, thanks Dex!
ahh clark thinks hs bad
ass
That he does.
Undead. They would be slower and dumber. Walking dead in 2 weeks!
ha!
I’m looking forward to the show starting back up. Hopefully this season is a little stronger than last. Should be a lot of new characters.
My first thought is in the last panel, the zombie looks like he wants to hold Clark’s hands and dance or comfort him during this time of zombie apocalypse outbreak.
2nd – fight words –
In a zombie movie. yeah it’s natural to do talk and “fighting words”. Against a living opponent, this could work, to psyche them out or enrage them so they make mistakes. Against a zombie, I think it only serves to “psyche up” the one talking, that he’s still living and get any courage to face this shambling, relentless horde.
How do I like my zombies? As close to the source material possible from original African & Haitian, Voodoo folklore and the use of puffer fish poison to put someone in a stupor for slave labor. Or doing the summoner’s bidding.
If they’re living zombies, there’s a chance for a cure. It’d make someone like Hershell from Walking Dead hopeful that he can just lock up his loved ones til the disease runs it’s course or a cure comes along.
If undead… makes it easier to justify that you have to rekill people so you can remain among the living.
Wow Fox, you’re probably the only person I’ve met who prefers the original Voodoo-flavored zombies to either the Romero undead or the 28-Days style ragers. Very cool!
Thanks Dave. The Romero zombies and all of the spin-offs from them are okay and all. But to me, it seems there’s only so many variations on this theme and story that can be done.
I like my mythology as it were and reading up on it. I don’t always like how things get presented when they become video-game fodder or “hollywoodized.”
That is a really interesting point.
Now I want to read a book/comic or watch a modern movie with voodoo zombies. The only problem I see is how to make voodoo zombies large-scale. Of course you can just make the environment smaller, like The Island of Dr. Moreau</i? (who has also appeared on this page).
You should check out White Zombie, Bo. It’s one of the only movies I know with Voodoo Zombies. It’s got some pretty damn creepy moments in it too.
Mmmm, I do loves me some pre-code horror movies. I’ll have to check it out.
Hey all, the John Grey’s Revenge Guest strip was delayed again. He’s got it scripted, just having some issues getting it shot and edited. Don’t worry, he hasn’t forgotten about it.
Whoot! I’m sure it will be great when he’s got it done!
Boo.
<- Does NOT like.
That’s okay, tell him to take extra time to get it exactly right if he thinks he needs to! 😀 I’d rather have a better webcomic finale than a rushed one! 😉
Agreed!
webcomic madness!
you know dave, your daughter is lucky to have been born after Hannah montana got bummed out, my sisters had to shop at a store carefully, you would never find a article of clothing without HM on it, be careful about those things.
I guess that is fortunate.
Damn I have got to stop loosing track of this thing. So, the character I don’t like is being attacked by zombies. Schadenfreude levels high. Banter with something that can not in the least comprehend what you’re saying.
In terms of the discussion question, I most certainly prefer dead ones, specifically the style where people die then zombify and not the sort where long-dead corpses can resurrect.
Nothing wrong with occasionally taking pleasure in your enemies’ misfortunes, right?
Of course, you’re forgetting that BotD zombies don’t even care about what their misfortunes are! 😀
Hah, true. I was referencing Clark here though, since Replica said Clark was his least favorite character.