The living dead are everywhere these days…in our cineplexes, on our TVs, in our Xboxes, on the Miami beltway…and definitely in our comic bins.
But it wasn’t always that way.
In 1994, it was a far different world. It had been a few years since Romero had made a living dead picture, and it was a couple of years yet before Resident Evil hit the scene and changed the game. Zombies were not in the public eye, and they sure as hell weren’t in comic shops.
So it was quite the surprise when VISUAL ANARCHY Presents TALES OF THE DEAD emerged from out of the blue.
Written by Cry for Dawn co-creator Joe Monks, Tales of the Dead was intended to be an eight-issue mini-series that chronicled the fall of mankind to hordes of the hungry, hateful dead. While other comics of it’s kind had focused on a single (if fluctuating) group of characters on a single, long and horrifying journey. But Tales of the Dead took a different approach, that was and still is unique.
Told in three ongoing scenarios, it allowed the apocalyptic events to unfold from three separate viewpoints at once, with each one exploring different aspects of the dawning nightmare, and each one maintaining it‘s own distinct look and feel.
In THE PARTY CRASHER (illustrated by Batman‘s Ed McGuinness), a pack of bikers camped out in the deep woods are barged-in upon one night by a mangled stranger. After biting up some of the members, the crazed individual is brutally put down, earning a roll through the campfire and a bullet through the brain for his actions. Only he was dead when he showed up…and he has no intention of staying down. Things go from bad to worse, as the area’s history as a dumping ground for a murderous local farmer comes back to haunt the present.
BIZARRE FUNERAL MARCH (illustrated by Tom O’Connor) opens in the wake of a tragic bus crash that left forty-four citizens of a small community dead. In the wee hours of the morning before the town’s mass funeral, those forty-four dearly departed neighbors - along with their friends in the graveyard - return to their loved ones…with less than loving results.
As EARTHLY RUMBLINGS (illustrated by Chuck Regan) begins, a young couple with psychic abilities awaken to the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. The feeling seems to emanate from a sprawling cemetery, out in the county…where the two arrive in time to feel the gate between life and death being violently pushed open.
The various serials come together to form a tapestry, of the Armageddon that’s being presented…with different elements and clues scattered throughout.
THE PARTY CRASHER hints at the horrifying notion that these zombies won’t necessarily go down with a headshot. BIZARRE FUNERAL MARCH paints a portrait of the dead full of hate, coming back to murder their “loved” ones, and murder them again when they come back as zombies. Earthly Rumblings treads into almost Fulci-esque territory, with hanged priests, gates to the other side, and a ‘prelude to Hell’ feeling of dread that points to the true weight of the horrors yet to come.
TALES OF THE DEAD ISSUE #2 features a standalone story called MUTATION (written and illustrated by Frank Forte and R. Murdock), that actually presents the situation from the zombie’s point of view. Taking place in a power-tool-strewn gallery of defiled human victims, it splatters across the page like a Cannibal Corpse album cover with a narrative, revolving around the slow torture of a human captive at the hands of a zombie with an almost racist hatred of the living.
Tales of the Dead was the dark and twisted beginning of a grand and hellish tale…but alas, what it was building up to, we may never know. Several schedule-crippling setbacks ultimately put Tales of the Dead into the grave after a mere two issues. A “Collector’s Pack” was released sometime after, a limited edition binder containing the two printed issues, a signed sheet of promo trading cards, and a mysterious diskette entitled “Sacrifice”…which crashed my computer when I finally got my hands on a copy a few years back. It’s contents remain a mystery.
