Zombie Cliche Lookout:
Depending on the mythology of the world in which a zombie story is set, people who die having not been bitten or scratched by a zombie may or may not turn. Regardless of this, if the person is infected when they die, it’s in everyone’s best interest to prevent them from reanimating. After all, every new zombie is another new threat for people to deal with. Furthermore, it’s a lot harder to fight against a zombie that used to be someone you know, rather than the zombie of a complete stranger.
Naturally, the only way to ensure that a recently deceased person doesn’t reanimate is to destroy their brain. That’s a pretty ugly process. Even if you manage to do it with minimal mess using something like an ice pick, you’re still ice picking the body of someone you used to know and like, maybe even love.
About this Episode:
I’m opting to not show poor Ted’s eggs getting scrambled. Once again, I think this is something that’s better off being suggested, rather than explicitly shown.
Discussion Question:
Here’s one from BrickVoid (I’m using this question because I wasn’t sure which question he’d actually “submitted”, so to speak): “Something I’d like to see answered, properly, is whether people who have purposefully had head injury dealt to them that would prevent a zombie from forming actually works. To that end, I hope Dave is going to show us how that works in his comic!”
Once again, since this isn’t my question, I’m going to toss my hat in the ring as far as an answer goes.
I think this is an interesting question, but to answer it, we would need to know what it is in the brain that causes a zombie to form. Since zombies appear to have extremely primitive abilities, I would assume that this would take place in the brain stem and other more primitive parts of the brain. Destroying those, unfortunately, would also destroy the patient.
Good choice, Dave, on not showing Ted’s “eggs being scrambled”. It’s true that gruesome character deaths have their time and place but when you’re going for a dramatic and sad death or a mercy kill, I don’t think the gore should be seen, just so that it isn’t cheap death.
Excellent; that’s exactly what I was going for!
nice
Thanks!
so we are friends again
Great point and one that is never covered in zed movies. Using the Walking Dead for example here, we frequently see bullet to the head and head smashed open taking out zeds BUT there are many times they use a knife, screwdriver, hammer, crossbow bolt or other method which only damages the brain but still takes out the zed. Heck some of those stab wounds a living person could survive but down goes the zed. Seems like a zed’s brain is so delicate the slightest scratch takes them out.
Fire is another method that does not seem realistic. Everyone knows that if you light a zed on fire they just keep coming at you and spread the fire around until all their flesh has melts away. But if you are burning at 400 to 600 degrees F you would think the delicate zed brain would boil to death rather quickly.
If you believe some of the movie fires they start the person’s brain happens to be so lucky the fires spread away from the area of the head all the time. I haven’t seen much in the way of burning people but it seems as if some villains can survive an extraordinary amount of burn damage to the head regions! 😀