Zomdingo

I only ever read one issue of Marvel Comics' Tales of the Zombie but it's stayed with me over the course of the intervening 30 years... specifically the manner of protagonist Simon Garth's death prior to becoming said zombie. The line I've repeated to myself over the decades was spoken by Garth's grumbling gardener and eventual murderer, who is introduced as he attempts maladroitly to trim the kudzu from Garth's New Orleans plantation. ("These shears wouldn't cut hot butter," he seethes through his stubble.) Garth upbraids the louse and the gardener in his pique ultimately stabs his employer to death with the shears. Although Tales of the Zombie was written and drawn well after George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) changed horror forever, the story's genesis took place twenty years earlier, in Stan Lee and Bill Everett's one-off story "Zombie," which appeared in a 1953 issue of Menace, published by Atlas Comics (which would metamorphose into the better known Marvel Comics).

So even though Tales of the Zombie takes place post-Romero, its depiction of a zombie is old school and truer to the voodoo variant we know from such films such as WHITE ZOMBIE (1932), I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) and ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY (1945)... a mindless automaton ejected from society who suffers not only a walking death but a social one as well. And as voodoo is an African religion (albeit one wrapped around the precepts of Catholicism), it's hard to view such a zombie outside of the context of the very Africans who were its intended victims. While Simon Garth is a typical Aryan-blond hero (as I remember), in un-death he becomes a kind of white Negro, an un-person whose main attribute is his animal-like strength and a brawn barely concealed beneath tattered clothing (which brings to mind plantation hand-me-downs), endowing him with a highly erotic charge common among zombies pre-Romero. Although Darby Jones wasn't the zombie of I WALK WITH A ZOMBIE and his Carrefour was revealed to be harmless, his blackness was used to evoke buried white fears of the feral prowess of black men.

As I never picked up another issue of Tales of the Zombie, I'll never know if Garth ever got his Ken Norton on but in these days of zombie over-saturation I of miss this complicated and contentious psychology, which however potentially offensive at least was more interesting to talk about than whether zombies should move slowly or quickly and whether they should eat flesh or brains. Gimme that old time voodoo any day!