The Walking Dead Premiere - Some Things Are Worth The Wait

"Anticipation...it's makin' me wait!" - Old Heinz ketchup commercial

I've been disappointed by hype before, or at best, just a little let down. Way in the back of my mind, I feared the same would happen with AMC's new original series, The Walking Dead. It finally - after months of waiting - premiered appropriately on October 31 to the well-oiled hype machine that is AMC. That station, I tell you, is riding a serious wave of successful original series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. They, like HBO, seem to set the bar very high in terms of quality, so I knew the series was in good hands. But that nagging fear remained in the back of my head: "What if it's just so-so...or worse, what if it sucks?"

I'm happy to say that not only did the premiere live up to my expectations, it exceeded them.

Now, I may or may not review each episode. I haven't decided yet. More likely, I'll bookend the season with reviews starting with this one. Needless to say, if was borrowing a page from Roger Ebert's book, I'd be giving this a huge thumbs-up.

I love infection horror, and that's evident in my blog. Hell, I prefaced watching this premiere with my annual Halloween viewing of 1978's Dawn of the Dead. More than that, I'm a huge fan of the comic book from Image Comics, created and written by Robert Kirkman, who also co-produced the series (Kirkman also writes a superhero series called Invincible that I hope makes it to the screen as well). Knowing he had a huge say in what went down, and knowing director/screenwriter extraordinaire Frank Darabont was in charge, put me more and more at ease.

Many of you have already seen it, and I'm not going to spoil things for the rest of you. Basically, the plot follows the book for the most part: Deputy Rick Grimes wakes up after a gunshot puts him in a coma to find that the world has really changed. There aren't any living people that he sees right away, but there are plenty of dead bodies...and some of them move. Rick leaves the hospital and returns home to find his wife and son gone. He meets Morgan and Duane, a father and son living in a house once occupied by Rick's neighbors, and they get him up to speed about the disease that has reanimated the dead. In a brilliant but tragic addition to the mythos, Morgan and Duane agonize over the sight of Morgan's wife, Duane's mother, returning day after day as a zombie. Rick intends to move on to Atlanta to find his family, hoping Morgan and Duane will join him later. He finds a horse and rides into the city, but finds nothing but hungry ex-people. Trapped in a tank, Rick hears someone calling him "dumbass" on the radio (if you read the book, you know who it is) as the episode comes to a close.

I skimmed over quite a bit of it, but really, if you're able to watch it, you need to see and hear the experience. The flies buzzing? Nice touch. There are scenes that are perfectly silent, and the confusion and disorientation is enough to drive you crazy because you have no music cues to warn you, or tell you how to feel. The disease spares no one. Yes, a little girl zombie falls in the first few minutes. I know the "politically correct" will be up in arms: "what kind of image is that to show our precious children?" Please. It's horror. What would you do, give it Twizzlers and positively reinforce it not to bite you? Same with the horse. That's in the comic as well. It's hard to see, but it portrays how a zombified world would be. The living dead don't care about cuteness. They're just hungry forces of nature. Another gory, but great, touch was the completely masticated woman lying in the hospital hallway. Darabont told so much story in Rick's post-awakening scene with hardly a word. The half-woman bicycle zombie is straight from the book, but Darabont adds so much pathos and emotion to each scene, it's like an enhanced version of an already-great work. I really hope the rest of the season holds up to this fantastic premiere.

I can't enough good things about it. I've seen overwhelmingly positive reviews, and mine stands as my own. I'm sure there are some who didn't like it, but that's life. Or undead life. So many puns, so little time.

Until later, my friends, try to be awake when the zombie apocalypse comes. And be sure to catch The Walking Dead on AMC, Sundays at 10 p.m.

Horror In Comics: Final Crisis (DC Comics) Turpin Becomes Darkseid

(ALL images contained herein are the property of DC Comics - at the end of the day, you should really buy the book I'm about to discuss - trust me on this)

In the world of the superhero, at the end of the day's adventure, the good guys win. No matter how vile the bad guy, somehow the hero will find a way to defeat him or her. It's part of the wish-fulfillment aspect of the comic book and superhero fiction: we, the readers, wish we could employ a variety of powers to tackle the bad guys of the world. But that very notion and super-basic plot device is the basis for something with terrifying potential in fiction:

What happens when evil wins?



Sure there are times when the bad guy gets the upper hand. You can't have a plausible hero without some setbacks here and there. It's why for every hero, there are at least a good half dozen villains in his or her "rogues gallery." But what if there was a moment when the ultimate evil finally - after centuries of trying - set his horrible foot into our world and brought it crashing down, and the heroes figured it out too late to stop it?

This is the basic premise of 2008's DC Comics miniseries Final Crisis, written by my favorite comic book author, Grant Morrison and featuring art by J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, and several others. Like a good writer should, Morrison began planting the seeds for Final Crisis in earlier works, going back several years. There are clues pointing to Final Crisis in books such as JLA and the wild, ambitious miniseries 7 Soldiers of Victory. In fact, the Mister Miracle portion of 7 Soldiers serves as a prequel.

While Final Crisis has its place in the Crisis trilogy of DC Comics (Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis), it owes more to legendary creator Jack Kirby and his New Gods stories. Kirby wrote and drew huge epics about two warring worlds of demi-gods, heavenly New Genesis and hellish Apokolips. Sometimes the wars spilled over to our world, and there in the mix of things was Superman himself. The demi-gods were varied and colorful, intensely powerful and yet individually interesting. Heading up the evil gods was Darkseid, a granite-skinned despot who sought to ruin the heroes of Earth and corrupt reality to its core. Much of Darkseid's Silver Age appearances included soliloquies swearing vengeance or making threats.

In Final Crisis, Morrison laid the groundwork for Darkseid to finally enter our world. Doing so not only corrupted reality, but as Darkseid fell, it bent reality and put him at the epicenter of a cosmic pit, dragging our dimension down with it. High concept stuff, but never expect anything less from Morrison. The evil New Gods could infect the bodies of regular people until such a time that Darkseid could manifest himself in the body of a noble soul that he could systematically corrupt. And that's the moment I want to focus on for this blog (even after all that set-up!).



He finds such a noble soul in detective Dan Turpin, another great Kirby creation. During his investigation, Turpin meets Boss Dark Side, the manager of a seedy fight-club style nightclub for villains. Too late does he realize, but Turpin is infected by Darkseid's spirit through the Anti-Life Equation, a mathematical equation that is proof that Darkseid is lord over all.

This Anti-Life Equation is this - read with caution, lest YOU be infected:

loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment -- n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side


Turpin finds himself infected when he goes to investigate a lead in a bombed-out city, he meets strange, disturbing people who refer to him as "great one" and seem to know him. Hell, they even have Batman as a prisoner. There's no escape for Turpin. He's getting sicker while those odd people around him rejoice.


His body begins to change. His skin becomes like...granite. His soul is battling against something dark and familiar. He's had run-ins with the New Gods before, so he knows what he's dealing with and yet he knows how futile it is:

"I tried to show them what humanity's made of...But wrestling with Darkseid, well...It's like trying to beat the ocean unconscious..."

It's too much for Turpin, and as the world deteriorates in both physical and relative space, his soul is entirely supplanted by Darkseid. When his minion G. Gordon Godfrey (in the body of a Don King-like evangelist) asks for a sign:

"Give us a sign, great Darkseid...Thumbs up for the triumph of the human spirit...or thumbs down to summon a day of holocaust that will never end..."

...the former Dan Turpin gives us his chilling answer:


Outside, heroes are dying or are corrupted. Time and space is warped. The world has ended. Humans are slaves or dog soldiers completely ruined by the Anti-Life Equation which was broadcast on the Internet to infect as many as possible in the shortest amount of time. Weeks become days. There is no sunlight. Pockets of heroes and villains band together to resist the best they can. It's the end.

What gave me the heebie-jeebies was the deft combination of street-level spookiness and cosmic-scale scares. It's a world being corrupted almost overnight due to the ruination of time and space. The aspect of a mad god falling through dimensions and dragging realities into a dark singularity with him is a wild concept right at home in the mind of Grant Morrison. Evil has won and good didn't see it coming.



I reason I picked this instant of Final Crisis - the transformation of Dan Turpin into Darkseid through a corrupted soul - is that the idea of a malevolent force edging out the personality of a good person while ruining reality at the same time is a grand-scale scare to me. It reminds of what good Lovecraftian fiction is about: Old gods scratching their way back into our world through the corruption of everything that is good about us, and there's nothing we can do about it.


Of course, there is a conclusion to Final Crisis, but the heroes have to really fight for it. The miniseries remains very polarizing, with many fans hating it and many (like me) loving it. Since this is my blog, I'm just dealing with my perception of it. Morrison touched a dark nerve in superhero storytelling with this epic. It influenced my own writing, much as Morrison's work did when I discovered it in the 80's on Doom Patrol. The idea of the storyline made me re-think the box in which I imagine my own written worlds, and forced me to step outside of it.

That's good storytelling.

So, yes, while this isn't horror per se, it does have horror elements, most notably possession. That which was creepy in films like The Exorcist and more recently Paranormal Activity is present in Final Crisis. Also corruption is there, as I mentioned it in relation to H. P. Lovecraft's visions. If you have a chance to read it, I highly, highly recommend it.

Until next time, fellow survivors, don't let the zombies get blood all over your comic book collection. Bag 'em up!

Stay safe!