As you’ve probably heard, the fourth volume in Brian Lee O’Malley’s excellent Scott Pilgrim series was released yesterday, so I stopped in at the Silver Snail on the way down to last night’s “Beowulf” screening to pick up a copy.
I haven’t read it yet. I have, however, enthusiastically devoured a marvelous little paperback called “Zombies Calling”, written and illustrated by Halifax-based animator Faith Erin Hicks, in which a committed zombie-movie geek tries to save herself and two college pals from an infestation of the living dead by adhering to the rules of the genre, much as Neve Campbell and Jamie Kennedy did in “Scream”.
It’s just about perfect, really — a zombie adventure with a distinctly Scott Pilgrimish (Pilgrimian?) undercurrent of chaotic, self-aware wit. (Imagine the pustulent love child of Judd Apatow’s short-lived TV series “Undeclared” and Pegg and Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead”, set at a Canadian university where firearms are in short supply.)
The first few pages are online here. Hicks’ charming proto-version of the story starts here. But if I were you, I’d really just go ahead and buy the thing. It’s the best ten bucks I’ve spent in months … and it was way, way more fun than “Beowulf”.
I’m all for a good plague of zombies, but I think their role as figures of terror is getting a little stale. We need something new to be frightened of, something genuinely unexpected. Has anyone considered the fright potential of a hot, toasty, and seemingly innocuous Welsh Rarebit?