Zombies, Fads, and Mainstream

You know I always found it a bit strange that my interest in some things seems to fade whenever said things start to become more and more popular.  Perhaps it's just my nature as an artist (perhaps a bit of a pretentious one at times) to hate the mainstream and popular in favor of the independent and unknown.

Buddy: The Golfing Zombie

This is not to say the mainstream and popular are always BAD, but their ever-growing fan bases generally only serve to annoy me.  Case in point: Heath Ledger played a good Joker sure, but when everyone started hailing him as king of the villains, I found myself searching for more interesting, lesser-known villain roles, if only to avoid falling into the deep pit of conformity that is the mainstream.

This is why it's all the more odd that my interest in zombies has still remained as enthusiastic and intrigued as it first was the day I saw "Night of the Living Dead", despite the fact that zombies are probably one of the most popular subjects in modern culture.  I mean seriously, people can't seem to get enough of the undead!

Video games, Movies, Books, Comics, even a new TV show "The Walking Dead" has sprouted, essentially making zombies the most culturally diverse monsters of our time, succeeded only by Vampires!  Even those things are slowly but surely losing popularity as Hollywood churns out as many Twilight-esque films as possible to appeal to this new "Fluff Horror" demographic.

I can't quite place my finger on it.  With zombies so popular everywhere you go, why do I not find myself annoyed by it?  Part of it may be that zombies don't seem to really have that many rules.  The only requirement these days to be considered a true "zombie" is to basically have no sense of reasoning and look like you just stepped on a mine in a butcher shop.

  The "living dead' thing stopped being a requirement after the incredibly freaky 28 Days Later zombies were introduced into the mainstream culture, and since then the term "zombie" is basically used to describe anything that revolves around turning humans into mindless meat-eating machines.

Zombies seem to represent an idea that every person can't help but think about at some point in their lives.  And that idea is quite simple: Everyone you know, no matter how close you may be to them, have the potential to be killers.

That is to say, we all like to think we're all cozy beneath our trust blanket, and that everyone will always be nice to each-other as long as we all respect one another, but in reality of course, everyone may as well just be a walking time bomb.

So what better excuse to rid yourself of all this underlying fear and worry, than to explain it with the silly idea that mankind will go extinct not by their own hand, but by their own dead.

  The past will all come back and bite us in the butt at one point right?  So why not make that idea literal and imagine that the dead really are coming back and really do wanna bite us in the arse?

God knows a literal idea, no matter how silly it may sound, will be far more comforting than an abstract, near-invisible idea like the past taking form of modern day actions and inventions and blah blah blah blah blah.

Well that's enough zombie talk for one day, I'm too busy drawing them in silly situations to pay much more attention to their underlying message anyway. Toodles!