This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Contact us here.
Recent Features
A Matter of Evolution: Monkeys vs. Robots
They've been brought together before in James Kolchalka's Monkey vs. Robot books, by Mecha Kong in King Kong Escapes and Mojo Jojo's mech-suited machinations in The Powerpuff Girls. Primates and robots each imitate and mock humanity in their own way. When the postapocalyptic future finally overtakes us, will we be replaced by the robots we designed to serve us or live in a world reclaimed by nature and ruled from Gorilla City?
Let's see: there's a kingdom of evil invading from the north, there's a type of thieves' guild in a gritty capital city, plus a mysterious sword, tons of magic, and much more, all stuffed into that stereotypical fantasy container, the trilogy. How the heck could anyone do something interesting with this material? Over to you, newcomer Brent Weeks.
Cover
blurbs can be tricky things. Some authors see them as good publicity
tools, and who’s to say they’re wrong? After all, it puts their
name on books not their own, right there for eager readers to find.
Others see them as favours to pay back to writers who have helped
them, or forward to writers they’d like to see succeed. Sometimes
they backfire: if I try a book based on an author’s recommendation
and hate it, it’s a double blow. Not only to do I not like the
book in my hand, but my opinion of the blurbing author’s taste has
been seriously tarnished.
15 hours on the road and I was my own red-eye on I-94's corridor of stripclubs, fireworks and roadkill, racing past dead deer in Michigan, then Gary, Indiana's steel mills and through Chicagoland, the Sears Tower in the distance waiting for its evil eye, till the highway gave out in Wisconsin. Yes, I went to WisCon 32, the world's oldest feminist science fiction convention. And there I felt deeper fatigue than 15 hours, 2 countries, 4 states and 2 time zones. Zombie fatigue.
I've mentioned zombie fatigue before. I'm fatigued not because zombies are boring, but because I know more than I'd like and there's always more. I receive review copies for zombie comics. I see zombie movies at Midnight Madness. Games, zombie walks, a Sufjan Stevens' song—all probably part of some think tank's project for the new zombie century. Zombies are inescapable. So, of course, I attended a WisCon panel where Jim Munroe asked: “Do you suffer from zombie fatigue?” While panelists weren't happy with the panel's titular question (“Does It Have To Get Boring Before It Gets Good?”), I can put my fatigue to
work answering their two zombie-related questions.
The first is, Are there Japanese ghoul-type zombie plague movies? Yes, offhand, I can think of three. They're all comedic, but they exist. Wild Zero (2000) is like Rock'n'Roll High School, if aliens had turned the High School students into zombies. And if
the Ramones were Guitar Wolf, who also share a last name with their band: “Bass Wolf, Guitar Wolf and Drum Wolf.”
InTokyo Zombie (2005), characters are excited that Japan finally has its own zombie-plague. It stars Takeshi Miike regulars Sho Aikawa and Tadanobu Asano as jiu-jitsu aficionados who accidently kill their boss, bury him on a huge, garbage mountain (“Black Fuji”) and flee when the many bodies buried there rise up. Director/screenwriter Sakichi Sato also wrote Ichi the Killer and Gozu.
But before I totally tear up Ian's yard, I'll just add that Tokyo Zombie was originally a manga by Yusaku Hanakuma. (Last Gasp is releasing a nice-looking English translation in September, 2008).
If it were shot in the San Fernando Valley, Stacy: Attack of the School Girl Zombies (2001) would be a very particular kind of straight-to-DVD softcore title. But, instead, Naoyuki Tomomatsu's Stacy
is a zombie plague parody with a chainsaw named, “Bruce Campbell,” and “Romero Squads” that hunt and kill “Stacies,” zombified teenage girls.
And with every teenage girl inevitably becoming a Stacy, we come to the
second question: Could there be a feminist zombie story?
Why not? Avoiding the tricky question of what “feminism” is or
“zombies” are, I can think of two graphic novels and two movies
about women and zombies.
In
Faith Erin Hicks' Zombies Calling(Slave
Labor Graphics, 2007), Joss and her friends survive metafictionally
by following zombie movie rules. But Zombies
Calling is
less about surviving than Joss realizing her own competence as a
“zombie-ass-kicking-ninja” (6) and finally feeling able to leave
London, Ontario for London, England, where she meets a lad as
apparently Canada-obsessed as she is obsessed with England. The hero
of Michael and Peter Spierig's movie Undead
(2003) could be the woman who Joss wants to be. By the movie's end,
former Miss Catch-of-the-Day, Rene guards an post-apocalyptic
Australian zombie pen with her shotgun, wearing stompy boots and her
beauty queen tiara. Beyond the pleasure of a girl with a gun, the
film itself is arguably feminist in the way that slasher movies can
be feminist. Except in these zombie stories, a woman does the
slashing.
Elza
Kephart and Patricia Gomez' Graveyard
Alive!: A Zombie Nurse in Love (2003)
and J. Marc Schmidt's Eating
Steve: A Love Story
(Slave Labor Graphics, 2007) are more complex. Both focus on the
experience of zombified women. Graveyard Alive! is
a 1960s-style hospital romance set in Montreal. There's gore, but
the film's more Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray (and James Whale) than
Fulci or Argento. Bitten by a zombie woodsman, Nurse Patsy receives
an “ugly pretty girl” make-over via zombification and becomes
desireable to the hospital's male staff—and the envy of the other
nurses. But the zombie plague developing in Victoria Hospital is
less important than Nurse Patsy's newfound self-confidence and joie
de mort.
The
zombie plague is even more tangential in Eating Steve.
Set in Australia, Eating Steve
is also about a woman coming to terms with the aftermath of a zombie
attack. But unlike Nurse Patsy, Jill deals with having tried to eat
her boyfriend's brain. And unlike most zombies, Jill recovers after
one taste. She retreats to an isolated farmhouse—not holing up to
escape zombies but to get her life back together. She cuts her hair.
She flirts. And once she pays attention to media again, she saves
the world. But she doesn't have the ugly pretty girl make-over.
And, me? I like my red eyes just fine.
~~~
Trapped in a house surrounded by zombies, Carol Borden still cares enough to write about comics. And movies.
Hi Carol,
Thanks for the scoop on the Zombie Ladies!
I'm curious as to what you (and Ian and the rest of the Gutter denisons, for that matter) think makes zombies so hot right now? Clearly they are moving people. Is it just a backlash against the overthinking and angst of the vampires of the last two decades? Is it the culmination of consumer culture? Are we tired of sympatheic evil? What's up?
Demanding reductionist answers to complicated issues,
—weed
hey weed--
i'm not entirely sure it's responsible for me to answer because of the zombie fatigue and someone more into zombies could make many deeper, more interesting points.
but the uptick in american zombie material at least might have to do with an overall disgust with people in general, disgust with ourselves. romero's movies are social satires and they've followed an arc of increasing sympathy for the zombies or at least greater disgust with the unzombified. for example, in diary of the dead, sportsmen stringing up a zombie, then carefully shooting her so she remains a "living" head while the narrator wonders whether we deserve to survive. or there's joe dante's "homecoming," about the american iraq war dead rising up to vote.
but it might be just a slight difference of emphasis. part of the reason vampires became sympathetic is that it was easy to see humans in groups as so much more destructively evil than lone bloodsuckers. and american zombie stories are about group evil.
it's clear that there are differences in what american, canadian, australian and japanese zombie stories are about. the japanese movies seem to be about enjoying a new horror form. my own experience is that canadians are way into zombies and were before zombies really took off in american comics and movies.
—Carol Borden
Cerise Magazine's Robyn Fleming writes about her WisCon experience, if you're curious. i was sad to miss both the panel on octopusses and the panel on asian science fiction and fantasy ("not just japan").
OK, so The Happiness of the Katakuris really only has a brief appearance of undead/zombies for a musical number, but I couldn't resist putting it on this list.
Note that there are also other east asian zombie movies, such as Bio-Zombie (Hong Kong, 1998), but I was just limiting my search to Japanese movies.
—Mr.Dave
I accidentally included Wild Zero in the list of "other Japanese zombie movies" not mentioned above, and it seems I forgot to include one other Japanese zombie movie:
It apparantly features a kick-ass heroine, but that certainly doesn't mean it's feminist - should we consider movies like Resident Evil or Underworld or Tomb Raider feminist just because the main protagonist is a woman?
—Mr.Dave
weed--fixed your link!
mr. dave--never apologize for mentioning happiness of the katakuris!
—Carol Borden
Carol said: >And with every teenage girl inevitably becoming a Stacy, we come to the second question: Could there be a feminist zombie story?
Now you've done it. The wheels are turning in my head, but not completely.
I sort of owe Dave a review of Richard Morgan's Thirteen, and my thoughts about how it's kinda-sorta feminist science fiction. If I write that, then maybe something will break loose on the zombie feminist front. (Although it'd be a purely tangential thing, since Thirteen was science fiction -- no undead involved.)
>but it might be just a slight difference of emphasis. part of the reason vampires became sympathetic is that it was easy to see humans in groups as so much more destructively evil than lone bloodsuckers. and american zombie stories are about group evil.
Somewhat tangential thought... It seems vampires might want to keep human society as it is, so they'd have enough human victims and blood to sustain themselves. (Although they wouldn't want to prey on too many humans, because that'd draw unwanted notice -- a vampire's herd (the supply) would have to be much larger than demand.)
BTW, a new hallucination has kicked off... Every time I see a headline about Robert Mugabe, I misread "Zimbabwe" as "Zombiebwe."
Carol said: >And with every teenage girl inevitably becoming a Stacy, we come to the second question: Could there be a feminist zombie story?
Now you've done it. The wheels are turning in my head, but not completely.
I sort of owe Dave a review of Richard Morgan's Thirteen, and my thoughts about how it's kinda-sorta feminist science fiction. If I write that, then maybe something will break loose on the zombie feminist front. (Although it'd be a purely tangential thing, since Thirteen was science fiction -- no undead involved.)
>but it might be just a slight difference of emphasis. part of the reason vampires became sympathetic is that it was easy to see humans in groups as so much more destructively evil than lone bloodsuckers. and american zombie stories are about group evil.
Somewhat tangential thought... It seems vampires might want to keep human society as it is, so they'd have enough human victims and blood to sustain themselves. (Although they wouldn't want to prey on too many humans, because that'd draw unwanted notice -- a vampire's herd (the supply) would have to be much larger than demand.)
BTW, a new hallucination has kicked off... Every time I see a headline about Robert Mugabe, I misread "Zimbabwe" as "Zombiebwe."
Back off bitches, Fred the Viking is mine. Love and 1980s technology combine for a new world of romance in this collage of dating videos. (Thanks, Jen!).
~
Where would the internet be without Photoshop? Some surprisingly realistic "photos" about hunting a famous video game enemy that comes out of the sky...
~
Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane buckles his swash, fights the Devil's Reaper and becomes a puritan swordsman in, well, Solomon Kane--a much better action movie with Christian themes in which the hero is crucified than The Passion of the Christ.
~
Two items where Star Wars runs up against participatory culture: the completely awesome Animals with Lightsabers and the completely logical one-off joke The Hook.
~
Bill Harris on Play: "When I meet a grown-up who does not know how to play, I'm not
interested in talking to them. I would much rather talk to children,
who always understand play and always know how to laugh."
~
View all Notes here. Seen something shiny? Gutter-talk worth hearing? Let us know!
They've been brought together before in James Kolchalka's 
Let's see: there's a kingdom of evil invading from the north, there's a type of thieves' guild in a gritty capital city, plus a mysterious sword, tons of magic, and much more, all stuffed into that stereotypical fantasy container, the trilogy. How the heck could anyone do something interesting with this material? Over to you, newcomer Brent Weeks. 
15 hours on the road and I was my own red-eye on I-94's corridor of stripclubs, fireworks and roadkill, racing past dead deer in Michigan, then Gary, Indiana's steel mills and through Chicagoland, the Sears Tower in the distance waiting for its evil eye, till the highway gave out in Wisconsin. Yes, I went to WisCon 32, the world's oldest feminist science fiction convention. And there I felt deeper fatigue than 15 hours, 2 countries, 4 states and 2 time zones. Zombie fatigue.
The first is, Are there Japanese ghoul-type zombie plague movies? Yes, offhand, I can think of three. They're all comedic, but they exist. Wild Zero (2000) is like Rock'n'Roll High School, if aliens had turned the High School students into zombies. And if
the Ramones were Guitar Wolf, who also share a last name with their band: “Bass Wolf, Guitar Wolf and Drum Wolf.”