C
omic-Con gathered together the world's top zombie experts not named George Romero to talk zombies. Unsurprisingly, they see our favorite brain-eating shamblers in radically different ways. I cobbled together their comments from throughout the panel to paint a picture for how each writer imagines zombies. Max Brooks (World War Z): "Fast versus slow? Slow zombies are based on the hypothetical mobility scenario of necrotic flesh subjugated to high impact energy... and fast zombies suck." "The whole thing about zombies was the sheer size of the problem. The whole thing about monsters is you have to make a personal choice to go find them...you have to make a choice. With zombies, they come to you, and there is no safe place. That's thing about zombies is they are global, it is big, it is all-encompassing. You could still make the right decisions, they would come for you, and it didn't matter if you were a hot chick or a token black guy, you were dead." Mira Grant (Newsflesh Trilogy): "Zombies are humans enhanced chemically or by virus. Undead flesh eaters cannot be considered zombies. Only virologically or chemically enhanced humans can hold their heads high under the zombie name, preferably to better chew on your throat. I would posit they'd begin fast, then be reduced to the traditional zombie shamble, respirating the whole time." "Thanks to the humanization of vampires they are the only monster that it is universally OK to kill." "I view zombies as a metaphor for contagion. The way I approach them, they're the flu we can see coming, and the quarantine you can enforce with a shot gun." Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies): "Zombies are what I saw in Night of the Living Dead, and everything else is not a zombie. 28 Days is not a zombie movie." "Zombies are literally just dumb things for hot chicks to kill." Walter Greatshell (Xombies): "Return of the Living Dead. " Describing the zombies he wrote: "They don't eat brains, they sort of suck your soul." Amelia Beamer (The Loving Dead): "Zombieism can be a kind of STD." Joan Frances Turner (Dust): "People who are now dead and can remember who they were before they died. Part of being trapped in a body that is literally collapsing into nothingness. As for slow versus fast, slow." "That's somebody's mother. It's as if they're living out their after life in our world." Ryan Mecum (Zombie Haiku): "I like slow zombies/ Fast zombies are less creepy/ George Romero, yay." John Skipp (Book of the Dead (ed.)): "Zombies make me sad, ultimately. It blows being a zombie, being that utterly empty, and what really blows is being stuck in a world full of them. There's no one to talk with anymore, and they want to eat you." "Zombieism gives us this libertarian wonderland, where everyone we ever disagreed with, we get to shoot them with a gun." I'll finish with one more remark from Max Brooks: "The last time zombies were really popular was the 1970s, and it was a time of global tension. We had terrorism, and unpopular wars, an energy crisis and recession. I think as the world gets its shit together and calms down, we'll all be on the staff of Twilight, the sit-com."
