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| Earl Norem |
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| Earl Norem |
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| Boris Vallejo |
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| Earl Norem |
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| Earl Norem |
I really enjoyed seeing these British Tales of Terror covers which re-use artwork originally created for Marvel's Tales of the Zombie magazine some years before. The artwork by Boris Vallejo and the painfully underrated Earl Norem is given a great fresh feel with some changes in hues.
Zombies seem to be the monsters of the hour, having displaced vampires from their lofty perch. Unlike vampires which have intelligence and so have evoked actual sympathy from some quarters (unbelievably), the zombie lacks anything other than the human form to make us feel kinship. The modern zombie is essentially an animal, voracious and implacable. I prefer the slow-walking zombies myself, their relentless stumbling tread seems surprisingly benign until it's not.
Some people seem to like zombie movies for the gore. That overwrought rot is often deadly dull, it's the people and their ability to deal with the dire circumstances which make these stories compelling or not. The stock zombie movie where everyone tries to be a tricked-out bad-ass zombie killer are dreadful as they lack the necessary component to make the "zombie apocalypse" scary, the notion that it's the problem of the everyman. AMC's The Walking Dead is frightening because we care about the people not the zombies. Terror is always about what could happen, not what does happen.
Rip Off
"Unlike vampires which have intelligence and so have evoked actual sympathy from some quarters..."
ReplyDeleteWhat I find disturbing are teen and adult women who LIKE the idea of vampires, who are decades or centuries-old "dirty old men" (though usuallly in hunky youthful-appearing bodies), lusting after the female leads in these stories.