Brian Azarello's Joker, Cover by Patricia Mulvihill
The night Joker was released from Arkham, the dregs sent some nobody named Jonny Frost to go pick him up and show him around town. Joker had caught wind that most of his assets, and by that I mean to say his city, had been snatched up by a few unscrupulous chums looking to get ahead while the clown was away. So sets the stage for the Brian Azarello and Lee Bermejo “Joker.”
Released near Dark Knight, the book seemed to have slipped under the radar of most comic aficionados, perhaps over shadowed by Alan Moore’s representation of the Joker from Killing Joke. That is part of what makes “Joker” so successful. Let’s face it kids, Alan Moore’s Joker shot Barbara Gordon in the spine. How much darker can you get with the clown prince?
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Our historical tour of Zombie History concludes with some great games and literature. Feel free to dive right in and test your survival skills or verse yourself in how to survive should the inevitable come.
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Today we continue our examination of Great Moments in Zombie History with your curator @Zombologist. right about now you might be asking yourself what qualifies Zombologist for that title? How does one get a PHD in Zombology?
In college, I majored in Micro-Biology and Anthropology. On one of my excursions into the heart of the South American rainforests, I discovered an indigenous group of people who swore to me they were experiencing a series of attacks from seemingly reanimated individuals. When I went out into the woods to track them, I found myself surrounded. From reading books and watching movies, I had a fairly good sense of the way a zombie acts and smells. The next three years held some of the most unpleasent yet informative moments of my life. Living amongst them, acclimating to their habits and learning to hunt with them as a horde changed my life.
So if you still don’t believe I’m qualified to mark these momentous occasions of Undead History, I challenge you to go live three years amongst the Zeds and see what you write about.
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You can barely hear Ellis shouting at you over all the screaming. It’s echoing all over the room, spaced out with bursts of gunfire or the bass boom of the shotguns. How did it come to this? Coach is off grabbing pills, always complaining about that bum knee of his, and you can’t help feeling bad for taking a crack at Rochelle after she saved your ass from that jockey.
This could be any one of several scenarios you step into when you fire up Left 4 Dead 2. While most people were complaining that Left 4 Dead 2 was going to be more like an addon to the first installment, I worried about whether or not I would like these characters. So much of that game is stepping into the shoes of the people I control (that is, after all, a common theme in Valve games). So it’s refreshing that these characters are likeable, believable and quotable at times.
One of the things I admire most is the way the dialogue changes depending on the situation. Frantic screaming might accompany a huge flood of zombies breaking through a doorway, for instance. Wisecracks add color to the world through the culture of the characters. All of this adds up to you caring about the people you are playing through the eyes of.
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Yours truly
People ask me why I love zombies as much as I do. They jokingly ask me if I have a plan to survive, they wonder how much material I’ve absorbed. It’s the one thing I will nerd rage about, almost on command.
For me, zombies represent horror in isolation. It’s not how you will survive; it’s whether you even want to. The scariest thing about the zombie apocalypse is the battle against your own wits. From our little outside bubble, we can say we would have shot that zombie, or shut that door, but would we? Would it be possible for us? How many of us would freeze up?
In celebration of the profound moral implications and horrifying dramatizations zombies have brought to our world, I present to you a few great moments in my personal catalogue of zombie history:
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