Recently in Tales of the Zombie Category

It's old Horror week at Marvel. At Wizard World Philly 2006, they announced that the Zombie is returning as well as the Son of Satan. Unfortunately, they are completely rebooting the Zombie from scratch. It makes sense--heck, there are only about a couple dozen of us left who remember the black and white Tales of the Zombie? A reboot makes sense from Marvel's point of view, but I think the writer, Mark Raicht, is missing something:

"This is an ensemble piece, but our main character is Simon Garth who is an Assistant Bank Manager. He is nothing special at the beginning of the story. Just a guy caught up in a bank robbery trying to survive. He makes a few semi-heroic choices that lead him into a Zombie nightmare of pretty epic proportions. Layla is a teller at the bank. Simon, and just about every other guy at the bank, has a crush on her. She's probably a bit too much woman for all of them though. She's also tough as nails and pretty opinionated. Not things that would endear you to a bank robber.

"Gyp is a bank robber. He hates Simon. He wants this money and he wants to get away. When the Zombies show up they're just another obstacle to him."

Huh, keeping the Simon Garth character but making him a plain old assistant manager? The original Zombie stories had a good deal going with making Garth a powerful boss of his own coffee company, then taking it all away by getting Zombi-fied and making matters worse by having him take orders from whoever wielded the amulet of Damballah. What the heck, I'm cranky--Raicht is probably going for humor in this tale. Nuff said.

“But what breed of man or woman finds pleasure in the degradation of another human being? What manner of man could be so shallow? Alas, you are about to find out.”

I knew little of the living dead when I saw Tales of the Zombie #1 at the Book Cache in Anchorage, Alaska. All I knew was that it was from Marvel, and that the cover by Boris Vallejo was one of the most striking images I’d ever seen. A creature with albino skin, standing in a foggy graveyard, clutching the arm of a frightened woman. The Zombie in the upper left hand corner reading a Marvel mag was cute. I bought it and devoured the origin story.

Written by Steve Gerber and drawn by John Buscema (one of his most outstanding black and white art jobs, inked by Tom Palmer and Syd Shores), it was violent, graphic, and sexy. Set in New Orleans, it was the story of Simon Garth, a successful coffee harvester. A hard-driving and conservative man, Simon cared only for his daughter Donna—who liked to skinny dip in the pool when no one was watching. When the gardener Gyps catches Donna in the nude, he makes advances and is thrown off by Simon. Vowing revenge, Gyps takes Simon to a voodoo party in the bayou. He’s supposed to be a living sacrifice to the Loa.

Fortunately for Simon, the voodoo priestess happens to be his super-hot secretary, Layla. Layla cuts him loose, and he runs through the bayou. Gyps runs Simon down and fatally stabs him with the shears that Simon told him to sharpen. Gyps buries Simon in the swamp and then decides that’s not good enough. To truly suffer, Simon must become one of the walking dead!

Gyps forces Layla to perform the voodoo ritual. Simon rises from the grave, and he’s adorned with the Amulet of Damballa. Whoever holds the duplicate coin has the power to control Simon and force him to do virtually anything. It’s a fickle power, perhaps dependent on the one holding the coin. Gyps orders Simon to kidnap Donna, but Simon somehow resists the command. When Gyps drops the coin in a drunken stupor, Simon swiftly kills him in his first moment of freedom.

From there, the series progressed with two main themes. One theme dealt with Simon struggling to end his hellish existence. The other theme dealt with various people getting the coin and forcing Simon to do terrible things. Steve Gerber was the perfect writer for the series. He excelled at writing mindless creatures, allowing the supporting cast to take over most of the story. He wrote the stories from Simon’s point of view, using second person narration: “You stand in a dark, windswept field somewhere outside New Orleans, but you do not feel the chill of the blustery night breeze. You do not feel anything.”