Zombies Calling puts university twist on the undead

Monday, 29 October 2007

Zombies may be sighted roaming the streets this Halloween, but come November, comic shops will still find some undead corpses lurching among their shelves in Zombies Calling, a new graphic novel by Canadian comic creator Faith Erin Hicks.

Zombies Calling will be made available through Slave Labor Graphics, a longtime independent publisher that has garnered a reputation for offbeat material that appeals to audiences beyond the stereotypical “Comic Book Guy” made famous on The Simpsons. Such stereotypes often presented a deterrent to reading comics for the 28-year-old artist when she was growing up in Ontario.

“I actually didn’t read a lot of comics when I was a kid, and it was exactly for that reason: because I was terrified of comic book stores,” explains Hicks, who now resides in Halifax.

Thankfully, she managed to get over her fears and is now putting out her first graphic novel. Set at an unnamed Canadian university, Zombies Calling features a 20-something main character named Joss, who, along with her roommates, finds herself facing a zombie outbreak that has nothing to do with students shuffling to early-morning classes.

Along with the brain-eating chaos and references to “The Rules” of any generic zombie rampage, Joss also finds time to lament the burden of her student loan debt and pending exam crunches. For the reader, Zombies Calling is a fun, light-hearted read that’s easily accessible, and the characters will certainly have a special appeal for students picking up the book.

“I did the postsecondary thing, and I did university, and then I went to Sheridan College to do a degree in animation, and I have a friend who graduated ten years before me at Sheridan—I graduated in 2004, and he graduated in 1994.

“When he went to Sheridan, he was paying $1000 a year for his tuition; I paid $7000 a year. So, in ten years, the tuition went up 700 per cent. And he graduated when animation was at its height, so he went and worked for Dreamworks; I work on crappy Flash animation and barely get by,” Hicks laughs.

While Zombies Calling is the first print graphic novel for Hicks, she cites the Internet as a useful training ground for developing her artistic skills.

“I’ve done a ton of online comics. I kind of taught myself how to draw doing online comics. I did one called Demonology 101, which started out as a kind of Buffy The Vampire Slayer ripoff.”

Some slayer-versed readers may wonder if the name “Joss” in Zombie Calling refers to Buffy creator Joss Whedon; it’s purely coincidental according to the author.

“Honestly, it really wasn’t meant to be [a reference to Whedon]. It’s short for Jocelyn. If people want to think that though, that’s fine. If I had his home address, I’d send him a few copies,” Hicks jokes.

The main trio that the story centers around will instantly strike readers as people they’d recognize around campus, but Hicks says that none of the characters are based on anyone in particular in her life.

“I don’t tend to base characters off of people that I know—maybe little bits here and there, but I’m always worried that I’ll offend them if I do. But Bill Watterson who did Calvin and Hobbes once said that every character you create is half of you.”

Zombies Calling draws much of its inspiration from the worlds of fiction and nearly every silly action cliché. Whether it’s found in movies, TV, or comics, expect it to be rearranged in satirical fashion with a solid zombie-kick to the decomposing head.

“I was watching the remake of the Bionic Woman, and it was just terrible,” Hicks recalls. “She’s an ordinary bartender and has no indication of any kind of martial arts training, and then all of a sudden, she’s got these bionic limbs, and then she’s beating the crap out of Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, and I’m just like, ‘This woman is a bartender.’

“That was kind of where Zombies Calling came from: this ridiculous cliché, like Michael Bay movies like The Rock, where Nicholas Cage is supposed to be this nerdy scientist, and then all of a sudden, he’s jumping into a Lamborghini and speeding through the streets,” she continues. “I mean, how did he learn how to drive a car like that? So, it was meant to be a parody of that kind of thing. It’s a ridiculous comic, and I really loved making it.”

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