Wandering the panels, walking through media: zombies, comics, and the post-apocalyptic world

Abstract

Focusing on transmedial entertainment franchises such as Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, and The Walking Dead, this article takes a straightforward formalist approach in order to study how zombies are represented in comics. It wishes to analyse the graphical expression of movements, the ways comics panels are laid out, the importance of the spatial coexistence of the images and the depiction of the (compulsive) repetition of the attack scene shown in movies and video games in order to explain why zombie fictions and their post-apocalyptic worlds are very easily translated into comics and why the ninth art is able to portray in an exemplary manner the transmedial figure of the zombie.

Keywords:

• comics
• The Walking Dead
• zombies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the external reviewer who really took the time to address each part of my argument and who helped to reshape the tone and the conclusive perspective of my article. I’m also indebted to the editors of the issue, Jan-Noël Thon and Lukas R.A. Wilde. Their feedback and criticism were more than useful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To avoid an overabundance of references, I will give additional information on the comics I mention directly in the text. It should also be noted that the pages of comics, especially American, are frequently not numbered. I take the first title page as a starting point when it is an anthology or the first page when I’m studying a single issue. Still, this count should only be seen as a marker to locate the analysed passages.

2. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, has been announced for 2016.

3. For a discussion of different examples, see my French article, Perron (2015).

4. The opening of 28 Days Later is certainly more famous than that of Day of the Dead (although Sarah’s dream is the real beginning of Romero’s movie). However, since the deserted London is revealed through the wanderings of Jim (Cillian Murphy), it is as much ‘telling’ Jim’s discovery as it is ‘showing’ the aftermath.

5. I owe this clarification to one of the external reviewers. I had indeed overlooked this interplay between the text and the image in comics.

6. This issue was included with the Blu-Ray edition of the movie.

7. The three captions are: (1) ‘They came as the night fell, invading our homes and feeding on the flesh of our families’; (2) ‘Within hours we were outnumbered. They occupied the places we once perceived to be shrines – wearing our clothes, wearing our faces’; and (3) ‘They force us into a world without rules. A world without government. A world… A world without lies’.

8. This is certainly the most significant comics series, whose first issues were adapted in 2010 by Frank Darabont for the American television network AMC. Tony Moore illustrated the first six issues, and Charlie Adlard has taken over since.

9. The popularity of these practical guides is due to Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide (2003).

10. As Benoit Peeters wrote: ‘Unlike cinema, the comics must … play with two very different parameters: The linearity of the succession of panels – induced by the segmentation – and the tabular configuration of the page – prompted by the page layout’ (Peeters 1998, 51, my translation from the French).

11. For Gotthold Emphraim Lessing, the ‘fertile’ or ‘pregnant moment’ is the most synthetic expression of an action: ‘for its compositions, which involve simultaneity, painting can only exploit one instant of the action and therefore must choose the most fertile, the one that will best render the preceding and following instants’ (Lessing 2002, 120–121, my translation from the French).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernard Perron

Bernard Perron is a Full Professor of Film and Game Studies at the University of Montreal, Canada. Among others, he has co-edited The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies (Routledge, 2014), edited Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (McFarland, 2009), and written Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (University of Michigan Press, 2012). His research and writing concentrate on video games and the horror genre. More information can be found at http://www.ludov.ca/.